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DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND ALUMNI 



OF 



DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, 



ON 



THE DAY PRECEDING COMMENCEMENT, JULY 27, 1853, 



COMMEMORATIVE OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 



BY 

RUFUS C HO ATE, 



PUBLISIIKD UY UEQUEST. 



BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE: 
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY 

1853. 



1= oto 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by 

JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY, 

In tlic Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



/ 



7 

'2) 



CAMBKIDGE : 

ALLEN AND I ARNHAM, rr.IXTERS. 



DISCOURSE. 



It would be a stranoje nesrlect of a beautiful and 
approved custom of the schools of learning, and of one 
of the most pious and appropriate of the offices of liter- 
ature, if the colley-e in which the intellectual life of 
Daniel Webster began, and to which his name imparts 
charm and illustration, should give no formal expression 
to her grief in the common sorrow ; if she should not 
draw near, of the most sad, in the procession of the 
bereaved, to the tomb at the sea, nor find, in all her 
classic shades, one affectionate and grateful leaf to 
set in the garland with which they have bound the 
brow of her child, the mightiest departed. Others 
mourn and praise him by his more distant and more 
general titles to fame and remembrance ; his supre- 
macy of intellect, his statesmanship of so many years, 
his eloquence of reason and of the heart, his love 
of country incorruptible, conscientious, and ruling every 
hour and act ; that greatness combined of genius, 
of character, of manner, of place, of achievement, which 
was just now among us, and is not, and yet lives still 
and evermore. You come, his cheri>shing mother, to 
own a closer tie, to indulge an emotion more personal 



and more fond, — grief and exultation contending for 
mastery, as in the bosom of the desolated parent, whose 
tears could not hinder him from exclaiming, " I would 
not exchange my dead son for any living one of Chris- 
tendom." 

Many places in our American world have spoken his 
eulogy. To all places the service was befitting, for " his 
renown, is it not of the treasures of the whole country?" 
To some it belonged, with a strong local propriety, to 
discharge it. In the halls of Congress, where the majes- 
tic form seems ever to stand and the deep tones to 
linger, the decorated scene of his larger labors and most 
diffusive glory ; in the courts of law, to whose gladsome 
light he loved to return, — putting on again the robes of 
that profession ancient as magistracy, noble as virtue, 
necessary as justice, — in which he found the beginning 
of his honors ; in Faneuil Hall, whose air breathes and 
burns of him ; in the commercial cities, to whose pur- 
suits his diplomacy secured a peaceful sea ; in the cities 
of the inland, around whom his capacious public affec- 
tions, and wise discernment, aimed ever to develop the 
nncounted resources of that other, and that larger, and 
that newer America ; in the pulpit, whose place among 
the higher influences which exalt a state, our guide in 
life, our consolation in death, he appreciated profoundly, 
and vindicated by weightiest argument and testimony, 
of whose offices, it is among the fittest, to mark and 
point the moral of the great things of the world, the 
excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power pass- 
ing away as the pride of the wave, — passing from our 



eye to take on immortality ; in these places, and such as 
these, there seemed a reason beyond, and other, than 
the universal calamit}^, for such honors of the grave. 
But if so, how fit a place is this for such a service ! We 
are among the scenes where the youth of Webster 
awoke first, and fully, to the life of the mind. We stand, 
as it were, at the sources, physical, social, moral, intellec- 
tual, of that exceeding greatness. Some now here saw 
that youth ; almost it was yours, Nilum pannim videre. 
Some, one of his instructors certainly, some possibly of 
his class mates, or nearest college friends, some of the 
books he read, some of the apartments in which he 
studied, are here. We can almost call up from their 
habitation in the past, or in the fancy, the whole spiritual 
circle which environed that time of his life ; the opinions 
he had embraced ; the theories of mind, of religion, of 
morals, of philosophy, to which he had surrendered him- 
self; the canons of taste and criticism which he had 
accepted; the great authors wdiom he loved best; the 
trophies which began to disturb his sleep ; the facts of 
history which he had learned, believed, and begun to 
interpret ; the shapes of hope and fear in wliich imagi- 
nation began to bring before him the good and evil of the 
future. Still the same outward world is around you, 
and above you. The sweet and solemn How of the river 
gleaming through intervale here and there ; margins 
and samples of the saipe old woods, but thinned and re- 
tiring ; the same range of green hills yonder, tolerant 
of culture to the top, but shaded then by primeval 
forests, on whose crest the last rays of sunset lingered ; 

1=!: 



6 



the summit of Ascutney ; the great northern light that 
never sets ; the constelkitions that walk around, and 
watch the pole ; the same nature, undecayed, unchang- 
ing, is here. Almost, the idolatries of the old paganism 
grow intelligible. " Magnorum fluminmn capita veneramw^' 
exclaims Seneca. " Suhita et ex ahrupto vasti amnis eniptio 
aras liabet .'" We stand at the fountain of a stream ; we 
stand rather at the place where a stream, sudden, and 
from hidden springs, bursts to light ; and whence we 
can follow it along and down, as we might our own Con- 
necticut, and trace its resplendent pathway to the sea ; 
and we venerate, and would almost build altars here. 
If I may adapt the lofty language of one of the admirers 
of William Pitt, we come naturally to this place, as if we 
could thus recall every circumstance of splendid prepara- 
tion which contributed to fit the great man for the scene 
of his glory. We come, as if better here than elsewhere, 
"we could watch, fold by fold, the bracing on of his 
Vulcanian panoply, and observe with pleased anxiety, 
the leading forth of that chariot which, borne on irre- 
sistible wheels, and drawn by steeds of immortal race, is 
to crush the necks of the mighty, and sweep away the 
serried strength of armies." 

And therefore it were fitter that I should ask of you, 
than speak to you, concerning him. Little indeed any- 
where can be added now to that wealth of eulogy that 
has been heaped upon his tomb. Before he died even, 
renowned in two hemispheres, in ours he seemed to be 
known with a universal nearness of knowledge. He 
walked so long and so conspicuously before the general 



eye ; his actions, liis opinions, on all things, which had 
been large enough to agitate the public mind for the 
last thirty years and more, had had importance and con- 
sequences so remarkable — anxiously waited for, pas- 
sionately canvassed, not adopted always into the parti- 
cular measure, or deciding the particular vote of gov- 
ernment or the country, yet sinking deep into the reason 
of the people — a stream of influence whose fruits it is 
yet too soon for political philosophy to appreciate com- 
pletely ; an impression of his extraordinary intellectual 
endowments, and of their peculiar superiority in that 
most imposing and intelligible of all forms of manifesta- 
tion, the moving of others' minds by speech — this im- 
pression had grown so universal and fixed, and it had 
kindled curiosity to hear him and read him, so wide 
and so largely indulged ; his individuality altogether 
was so absolute and so pronounced, the force of will no 
less than the power of genius ; the exact type and flisli- 
ion of his mind, not less than its o-eneral maornitude, 
were so distinctly shown through his musical and trans- 
parent style ; the exterior of the man, the grand mystery 
of brow and eye, the deep tones, the solemnity, the sover- 
eignty, as of those Avho would build states, "where every 
power and every grace did seem to set its seal," had been 
made, by personal observation, by description, by the 
exaggeration even of those who had felt the spell, by 
art, the daguerreotype, and picture, and statue, so familiar 
to the American eye, graven on the memory like the 
Washington of Stuart; the narrative of the mere incidents 
of his life had been so often told — by some so authenti- 



8 

cally, and with such skill — and had been so literally 
committed to heart, that when he died there seemed to 
be little left but to say when and how his change came ; 
with what dignity, with what possession of himself, with 
what loving thought for others, w^ith w^hat gratitude to 
God, uttered with unfaltering voice, that it was appoint- 
ed to him there to die ; to say how thus, leaning on the 
rod and staff of the promise, he took his way into the 
great darkness undismayed, till death should be swal- 
lowed up of life ; and then to relate how they laid him 
in that simple grave, and turning and pausing and join- 
ing; their voices to the voices of the sea, bade him hail 
and farewell. 

And yet I hardly know what there is in public biog- 
raphy, what there is in literature, to be compared, in its 
kind, with the variety and beauty and adequacy of the 
series of discourses through which the love and grief, 
and deliberate and reasoning admiration of America for 
this great man, have been uttered. Little, indeed, there 
would be for me to say, if I were capable of the light 
ambition of proposing to omit all which others have said 
on this theme before, — little to add if I sought to say 
any thing wholly new. 

I have thought, perhaps the place where I was to 
speak suggested the topic, that before w^e approach 
the ultimate and historical greatness of Mr. Webster, in 
its two chief departments, and attempt to appreciate by 
what qualities of genius and character, and what suc- 
cession of action he attained it, there might be an 
interest in going back of all this, so to say, and pausing 



9 

a few moments upon bis youth. I include in that 
designation the period from his birth, on the eighteenth 
day of January, 1782, until 1805, when, twentj^-tbree 
years of age, he declined the clerkship of his father's 
court, and dedicated himself irrevocably to the profes- 
sion of the law, and the chances of a summons to less 
or more of public life. These twenty-three years we 
shall call the youth of AYebster. Its incidents are few 
and well known, and need not long detain us. 

Until May, 1796, beyond the close of his fourteenth 
year, he lived at home, attending the schools of masters 
Chase and Tappan, successively; at work sometimes 
and sometimes at play like any boy ; but finding 
already, as few beside him did, the stimulations and the 
food of intellectual life in the social library; drinking 
in, unawares, from the moral and physical aspects about 
him, the lesson and the power of contention and self 
trust ; and learning how much grander than the forest 
bending to the long storm; or the silver and cherishing 
Merrimack swollen to inundation, and turning, as love 
become madness, to ravage the subject intervale; or 
old woods sullenly retiring before axe and fire — learn- 
ing to feel how much grander than these was the com- 
ing in of civilization as there he saw it, courage, labor, 
patience, plain living, heroical acting, high thinking, 
beautiful feeling, the fear of God, love of country, and 
neighborhood, and family, and all that form of human 
life of which his father, and mother, and sisters, and 
brother, were the endeared exemplification. In the 
arms of that circle, on parent knees, or later, in inter- 



10 

vals of work or play, tlie future American Statesman 
acquired the idea of country, and became conscious of 
a national tie and a national life. There and then, 
something, glimpses, a little of the romance, the sweet 
and bitter memories of a soldier and borderer of the 
old colonial time and war, opened to the large dark ' 
eyes of the child; memories of French and Indians 
stealing up to the very place where the story was 
telling ; of men shot down at the plough, within sight 
of the old log house ; of the massacre at Fort William 
undr-Maxy ; of Stark, of Howe, of Wolfe falling in the 
arms of victory ; and then of the next age, its grander 
scenes and higher names ; of the father's part at Ben- 
nington and White Plains; of Lafayette and Wash- 
ington ; and then of the Constitution, just adopted, and 
the first President, just inaugurated, with services of 
public thanksgiving to Almighty God, and the union 
just sprung into life, all radiant as morning, harbinger 
and promise of a brighter day. You have heard how 
in that season he bought and first read the Constitution 
on the cotton handkerchief A small cannon, I think his 
biographers say, was the ominous plaything of Napo- 
leon's childhood. But this incident reminds us rather 
of the youthful Luther, astonished and kindling over 
the first Latin Bible he ever saw — or the still younger 
Pascal, permitted to look into the Euclid, to whose 
sublimities an irresistible nature had secretly attracted 
him. Long before his fourteenth year, the mother first, 
and then the f\xther, and the teachers and the schools 
and the little neighborhood, had discovered an extra- 



11 

ordinary hope in the boy ; a purpose, a dream, not yet 
confessed, of giving him an education began to be 
cherished, and in May, 1796, at the age of a Httle more 
than fourteen, he was sent to Exeter. I have m3^self 
heard a gentleman, long a leader of the Essex bar, and 
eminent in public life, now no more, who was then a 
pupil at the school, describe his large frame, superb flice, 
immature manners, and rustic dress, surmounted with a 
student's gown, when first he came ; and say, too, how 
soon and universally his capacity was owned. Who 
does not wish that the glorious Buckminster could have 
foreseen and witnessed the whole greatness, but cer- 
tainly the renown of eloquence, which were to come 
to the young stranger, whom, choking, speechless, the 
great fountain of feelings sealed as yet, he tried in vain 
to encourage to declaim before the unconscious, bright 
tribes of the school ? The influences of Exeter on him 
were excellent, but his stay was brief In the winter 
of 1796 he was at home again, and in February, 1797, 
he was placed under the private tuition, and in the 
family of, Rev. Mr. Wood, of Boscawen. It was on the 
way with his father, to the house of Mr. Wood, that he 
first heard with astonishment, that the parental love and 
good sense had resolved on the sacrifice of giving him 
an education at college. " I remember," he Avrites, 
" the very hill we were ascending, through deep snows, 
in a New England sleigh, Avhen my fiither made his 
purpose known to me. I could not speak. How could 
he, I thought, with so large a family, and in such 
narrow circumstances, think of incurrino; so o-reat an 



12 

expense for me ? A warm glow ran all over me, and 
I lay my head on my Mher's shoulder and wept." 
That speechlessness, that glow, those tears reveal to 
us what his memory and consciousness could hardly do 
to him, that already, somewhere, at some hour of day 
or evening or night, as he read some page, or heard 
some narrative, or saw some happier schoolfellow set 
off from Exeter to begin his college life, the love of 
intellectual enjoyment, the ambition of intellectual 
supremacy had taken hold of him ; that, when or how 
he knew not, but before he was aware of it, the hope 
of obtaining a liberal education and leading a profes- 
sional life had come to be his last thought before he 
slept ; his first when he awoke ; and to shape his 
dreams. Behold in them, too, his whole future. That 
day, that hour, that very moment, from the deep snows 
of that slow hill he set out on the long ascent that 
bore him — " no step backward " — to the high places of 
the world ! He remained under the tuition of Mr. Wood 
until August, 1796, and then entered this college, where 
he was, at the end of the full term of four years, gradu- 
ated in 1801. Of that college life you can tell me 
more than I can tell you. It is the universal evidence 
that it was distinguished by exemplary demeanor, by 
reverence for religion, respect for instructors, and ob- 
servance of law. We hear from all sources, too, that 
it Avas distinguished by assiduous and various studies. 
With the exception of one or two branches, for which 
his imperfect preparation had failed to excite a taste, 
he is reported to have addressed himself to the pre- 



13 

scribed tasks, and to have availed himself of the whole 
body of means of liberal culture appointed by the 
government, with decorum and conscientiousness and 
zeal. We hear more than this. The whole course of 
traditions concerning his college life is full to prove two 
facts. The first is, that his reading, general and various 
far beyond the requirements of the facultj^, or the 
average capacity of that stage of the literary life, was 
not solid and useful merely, which is vague commenda- 
tion, but it was such as predicted and educated the 
future statesman. In English literature, its finer parts, 
its poetry and tasteful reading, I mean, he had read 
much rather than many things, but he had read some- 
what. That a young man of his emotional nature, full 
of eloquent feeling, the germs of a fine taste, the ear 
for the music of words, the eye for all beauty and all 
sublimity already in extraordinary measure his, already 
practising the art of composition, speech, and criticism, 
should have recreated himself, as we know he did, with 
Shakespeare, and Pope, and Addison ; with the great 
romance of Defoe ; with the more recent biographies 
of Johnson, and his grand imitations of Juvenal ; with 
the sweet and refined simplicity and abstracted observa- 
tion of Goldsmith, mingled with sketches of homefelt 
delight ; with the elegy of Gray, whose solemn touches 
soothed the thoughts or tested the consciousness of the 
last hour; with the vigorous originality of the then 
recent Cowper, whom he (pioted when he came home, 
as it proved, to die — this we should have expected. 

But I have heard, and believe, that it was to another 

2 



14 

institution, more austere and characteristic, that his 
own mind was irresistibly and instinctively even then 
attracted. The conduct of what Locke calls the human 
understanding; the limits of human knowledge; the 
means of coming to the knowledge of the different 
classes of truth ; the laws of thought ; the science of 
proofs which is logic ; the science of morals ; the facts 
of history; the spirit of laws; the conduct and aims 
of reasonings in politics — these w^ere the strong meat 
that announced and began to train the great political 
thinker and reasoner of a later day. 

I have heard that he might oftener be found in some 
solitary seat or walk, with a volume of Gordon's or 
Eamsay's Revolution, or of the Federalist, or of Hume's 
History of England, or of his Essays, or of Grotius, or 
Puffendorf, or Cicero, or Montesquieu, or Locke, or Burke, 
than with Virgil, or Shakespeare, or the Spectator. Of 
the history of opinions, in the department of philosophy, 
he was already a curious student. The oration he deli- 
vered before the United Fraternity, when he was gradu- 
ated, treated that topic of opinion, under some aspects, 
as I recollect from once reading the manuscript, with 
copiousness, judgment, and enthusiasm ; and some of his 
ridicule of the Berkleian theory of the non-existence of 
matter, I well remember, anticipated the sarcasm of a 
later day on a currency all metallic, and on nullification 
as a strictly constitutional remedy. 

The other fact, as well established, by all we can ga- 
ther of his life in College, is, that the faculty, so trans- 
cendent afterwards, of moving the minds of men by 



15 

speech, was already developed and effective in a remark- 
able degree. Always there is a best writer and speaker 
or two in College; but this stereotyped designation 
seems wholly inadequate to convey the impression he 
made in his time. Many, now alive, have said that some 
of his performances, having regard to his youth, his ob- 
jects, his topics, his audience — one on the celebration 
of Independence, one a eulogy on a student much be- 
loved — produced an instant effect, and left a recollec- 
tion, to which nothing else could be compared ; which 
could be felt and admitted only, not exj^lained; but 
which now they know were the first sweet tones of in- 
exjDlicable but delightful influence, of that voice, uncon- 
firmed as yet, and unassured, whose more consummate 
expression charmed and suspended the soul of a nation. 
To read these essays now disappoints you somewhat. 
As Quintillian says of Hortensius, Apparet placuisse all- 
quid CO dicente cpiod legcntcs noii invcnimus. Some spell 
there was in the spoken word which the reader misses. 
To find the secret of that spell, you must recall the 
youth of Webster. Beloved fondly, and appreciated by 
that circle, as much as by any audience, larger, more 
exacting, more various, and more fit, which afterwards 
he found anywhere ] known to be manly, just, pure, gen- 
erous, affectionate ; known and felt by his strong will, 
his high aims, his commanding character, his uncommon 
and difficult studies ; he had every heart's warmest good 
wish with him when he rose ; and then, when — un- 
checked by any very severe theory of taste, unoppressed 
by any dread of saying something incompatible with his 



16 

place and fliine, or unequal to himself — he just un- 
locked the deep spring of that elorpient feeling, which, 
in connection with his power of mere intellect, was such 
a stupendous psychological mystery, and gave heart and 
soul, not to the conduct of an argument, or the investi- 
gation and display of a truth of the reason, but to a 
fervid, beautiful, and prolonged emotion, to grief, to 
eulogy, to the patriotism of scholars — why need we 
doubt or wonder, as they looked on that presiding brow, 
the eye large, sad, unworldly, incapable to be fathomed, 
the lip and chin, whose lirmness as of chiselled, perfect 
marble, profoundest sensibility alone caused ever to 
tremble, why wonder at the traditions of the charm 
which they owned ; and the fame which they even then 
predicted ? 

His colleoe life closed in 1801. For the statement 
that he had thought of selecting the profession of the- 
ology, the surviving members of his family, his son and 
his brother-in-law, assure me that there is no foundation. 
Certainly, he began at once the study of the law, and 
interrupted only by the necessity of teaching an acade- 
my a few months, with which he united the recreation 
of recording deeds, he prosecuted it at Salisbiuy in the 
ofiice of Mr. Thompson, and at Boston in the office of 
Mr. Gore, until March, 1805, when, resisting the sharp 
temptation of a clerkship, and an annual salary of lifteen 
hundred dollars, he was admitted to the bar. 

And so he has put on the robe of manhood, and has 
come to do tlic work of life. Of his youth there is no 
need to say more. It had been pure, happ}', strenuous ; 



17 

in many things privileged. The influence of home, of 
his father, and the excellent mother, and that noble 
brother, whom he loved so dearly, and mourned with 
such sorrow — these influences on his heart, principles, 
will, aims, were elevated and strong. At an early age, 
comparatively, the then great distinction of liberal edu- 
cation was his. His college life was brilliant and without 
a stain ; and in moving his admission to the bar, Mr. Gore 
presented him as one of extraordinary promise. 

With prospects bright, upon the -world he came — 
Pure love of virtue, strong desire of fame ; 
Men watched the way his lofty mind would take, 
And all foretold the progress he would make. 

And 3'et, if on some day as that season was drawing to 
its close, it had been foretold to him, that before his life 
— prolonged to little more than threescore years and 
ten — should end, he should see that country, in which 
he was coming to act his part, expanded across a conti- 
nent ; the thirteen states of 1801 multiplied to thirty- 
one ; the territory of the Northwest and the great valley 
below sown full of those stars of empire ; the Mississippi 
forded, and the Sabine, and Rio Grande, and the Nueces ; 
the ponderous gates of the Rocky Mountains opened to 
shut no more ; the great tranquil sea become our sea ; 
her area seven times larger, her people five times more 
in number ; that through all experiences of trial, the 
madness of party, the injustice of foreign powers, the 
vast enlargement of her borders, the antagonisms of 
interior interest and feeling — the spirit of nationality 

2=:: 



18 

would grow stronger still and more plastic ; that the 
tide of American feeling w^ould run ever fuller ; that 
her agriculture would grow more scientific ; her arts 
more various and instructed, and better rewarded ; 
her commerce winged to a wider and still wider flight ; 
that the part she would play in human affairs would 
grow nobler ever, and more recognized ; that in this 
vast o-rowth of national o-reatness time w^ould be found 
for the higher necessities of the soul ; that her popular 
and her higher education would go on advancing ; that 
her charities and all her enterprises of philanthropy 
would go on enlarging ; that her age of lettered glory 
should find its auspicious dawn — and then it had been also 
foretold him that even so, with her growth and strength, 
should his fiime grow and be established and cherished, 
there where she should garner up her heart ; that by 
longr gradations of service and labor he should rise to 
be, before he should taste of death, of the peerless 
anion o; her g-reat ones ; that he should win the double 
honor, and w^ear the double wreath of professional and 
public supremacy ; that he should become her wisest to 
counsel and her most eloquent to persuade ; that he 
J should come to be called the Defender of the Constitu- 
tion and the preserver of honorable peace ; that the 
" austere glory of suffering " to save the Union should 
be his ; that his death, at the summit of greatness, on 
the verge of a ripe and venerable age, should be distin- 
guished, less by the flags at half-mast on ocean and lake, 
less by the minute-gun, less by the public procession, 
and the appointed eulogy, than by sudden paleness over- 
spreading all faces, by gushing tears, by sorrow, thought- 



19 

ful, boding, silent, the sense of desolateness, as if renown 
and grace were dead — as if the hunter's path, and the 
sailor's in the great solitude of wilderness or sea, hence- 
forward* were more lonely and less safe than before — 
had this prediction been whispered, how calmly had 
that perfect sobriety of mind put it all aside as a per- 
nicious or idle dream ! Yet, in the fulfilment of that 
prediction is told the remaining story of his life. 

It does not come within the plan which I have 
marked out for this discourse to repeat the incidents of 
that subsequent history. The more conspicuous are 
known to you and the whole American world. Minuter 
details the time does not permit, nor the occasion re- 
quire. Some quite general views of what he became 
and achieved ; some attempt to appreciate that intellec- 
tual power, and force of will, and elaborate culture, and 
that power of eloquence, so splendid and remarkable, 
by which he wrought his work ; some tribute to the en- 
dearing and noble parts of his character ; and some 
attempt to vindicate the political morality by which his 
public life w\as guided, even to its last great act, are all 
that I propose, and much more than I can hope worthily 
to accomplish. 

In coming, then, to consider what he became and 
achieved, I have always thought it was not easy to lay 
too much stress, in the first place, on that realization of 
what might have been regarded incompatible forms of 
superiority, and that excmjilification of what might have 
been regarded incompatible gifts or acquirements — 
" rare in their separate excellence, wonderful in their 



20 

special combination" — which meet us in him every- 
where. Remark, first, that eminence, rare, if not unpre- 
cedented, of the first rate, in the two substantially dis- 
tinct and unkindred professions — that of the law, and 
that of public life. In surveying that ultimate and 
finished greatness in which he stands before you in his 
full stature and at his best, this double and blended 
eminence is the first thing that fixes the eye, and the 
last. When he died he was first of American lawyers, 
and first of American statesmen. In both characters he 
continued — discharging the foremost part in each, 
down to the falling of the awful curtain. Both char- 
acters he kept distinct — the habits of mind, the forms 
of reasoning, the nature of the proofs, the style of elo- 
quence. Neither hurt nor changed the other. How 
much his understanding was "quickened and invigo- 
rated " by the law, I have often heard him acknowledge 
and explain. But how, in spite of the law, was that 
mind, by other felicity, and other culture, " opened and 
liberalized " also ! How few of what are called the bad 
intellectual habits of the bar he carried into the duties 
of statesmanship! His interpretations of the consti- 
tution and of treaties j his expositions of public law — 
how little do you find in them, where, if anywhere, 
you would expect it, of the mere ingenuity, the moving 
of " vermiculate questions," the word-catching, the schol- 
astic subtlety which, in the phrase of his memorable 
quotation, 

" Can sever and divide 
A hair 'twixt north and north-west side," — 



21 

ascribed by satire to the profession ; and how much of 
its truer function, and nobler power of calling, history, 
language, the moral sentiments, reason, common sense, 
the high spirit of magnanimous nationality, to the search 
of truth ! How little do we fuid in his politics of an- 
other bad habit of the profession, the worst " idol of the 
cave," a morbid, unreasoning, and regretful passion for 
the past, that bends and weeps over the stream, running 
irreversibly, because it will not return, and will not 
pause, and gives back to vanity every hour a changed 
and less beautiful face ! We ascribe to him certainly a 
sober and conservative habit of mind, and such he had. 
Such a habit the study and practice of the law doubtless 
does not impair. But his was my Lord Bacon's conser- 
vatism. He held with him, " that antiquity deserveth 
this reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, 
and discover what is the best way ; but when the disco- 
very is well taken, then to make progression." He 
would keep the Union according to the Constitution, 
not as a relic, a memorial, a tradition — not for what it 
has done, though that kindled his gratitude and excited 
his admiration — but for what it is now and hereafter 
to do, when adapted by a wise practical philosophy to 
a wider and higher area, to larger numbers, to severer 
and more glorious probation. Who better than he has 
grasped and displayed the advancing tendencies and 
enlarging duties of America ? Who has caught — whose 
eloquence, whose genius, whose counsels, have caught 
more adequately the genuine inspiration of our destiny? 
Who has better expounded by what moral and pruden- 



22 

tial policy, by what improved culture of heart and rea- 
son, by what true worship of God, by what good fiiith 
to all other nations, the dangers of that destiny may be 
disarmed, and its large promise laid hold on ? 

And while the lawyer did not hurt the statesman, the 
statesman did not hurt the lawyer. More ; the states- 
man did not modify, did not unrobe, did not tinge, the 
lawyer. It would not be to him that the epigram could 
have application, where the old Latin satirist makes the 
client complain that his lawsuit is concerning trcs capellce 
— three kids ; and that his advocate with large disdain of 
them, is haranguing wdth loud voice and both hands, 
about the slaughters of CannjB, the war of Mithridates, 
the perjuries of Hannibal. I could never detect that in 
his discussions of law he did not just as much recognize 
authority ; just as anxiously seek for adjudications old 
and new in his favor, just as closely sift them and col- 
late them, that he might bring them to his side if he 
could, or leave them ambiguous and harmless if he could 
not ; that he did not just as rigorously observe the pe- 
culiar mode wdiich that science employs in passing from 
the known to the unknown, the peculiar logic of the 
law^, as if he had never investigated any other than le- 
gal truth by any other organon than legal logic in his 
life. Peculiarities of legal reasoning he certainly had, 
belonging to the peculiar structure and vast power of 
his mind ; more original thought, more discourse of jirin- 
ciples, less of that mere subtlety of analysis, Avhicli is not 
restrained by good sense, and the higher power of duly 
tempering and combining one truth in a practical sci- 



23 

ence with other truths, from absurdity or mischief, but 
still it was all strict and exact legal reasoning. The 
long habit of employing the more popular methods, the 
probable and plausible conjectures, the approximations, 
the compromises of deliberative discussion, did not seem 
to have left the least trace on his vocabulary, or his rea- 
sonings, or his demeanor. No doubt, as a part of his 
whole culture, it helped to give enlargement and gen- 
eral power and elevation of mind ; but the sweet stream 
passed under the bitter sea, the bitter sea pressed on the 
sweet stream, and each flowed unmingled, unchanged in 
taste or color. 

I have said that this double eminence is rare, if not 
unprecedented. We do no justice to Mr. "Webster, if 
we do not keep this ever in mind. How many exem- 
plifications of it do you find in British public life ? The 
Earl of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Windham, Pitt, 
Grattan, Canning, Peel — were they also, or any one, the 
acknowledged leader in Westminster Hall or on the 
circuit ? And, on the other hand, would you say that the 
mere parliamentary career of Mansfield, or Thurlow, or 
Dunning, or Erskine, or Camden, or Curran, would com- 
pare in duration, constancy, variety of effort, the range 
of topics discussed, the fulness, extent and affluence of 
the discussion, the influence exerted, the space filled, 
the senatorial character completely realized — with his? 
In our own public life it is easier to find a parallel. 
Great names crowd on us in each department ; greater, 
or more loved, or more venerable, no annals can show. 



\ 



24 



But how few, even here, have gathered the double 
wreath, and the blended fame ! 

And now, having observed the fact of this combina- 
tion of qualit}' and excellence scarcely compatible, 
inspect for a moment each by itself 

The professional life of Mr. AVebster began in the 
spring of 1805. It may not be said to have ended 
until he died; but I do not know that it happened 
to him to appear in court, for the trial of a cause, after 
his argument of the Goodyear patent for improvements 
in the preparation of India Rubber, in Trenton, in 
March, 1852. 

There I saw, and last heard him. The thirt^'-four 
years which had elapsed since, a member of this Col- 
lege, at home for health, I first saw and heard him in 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the county of 
Essex, defending Jackman, accused of the robbery of 
Goodrich, had in almost all things changed him. The 
raven hair, the vigorous, full frame and firm tread, the 
eminent but severe beauty of the countenance, not yet 
sealed Avith the middle age of man, the exuberant 
demonstration of all sorts of power, which so marked 
him at first — for these, as once they were, I explored 
in vain. Yet how fir higher was the interest that 
attended him now: his sixty-nine years robed, as it 
w^ere, with honor and with love, with associations of 
great service done to the state, and of great fame 
gathered and safe; and then the perfect mastery of 
the cause in its legal and scientific principles, and in 



25 

all its facts ; the admirable clearness and order in 
which his propositions were advanced successively ; the 
power, the occasional high ethical tone, the appropriate 
eloquence, by which they were made probable and 
persuasive to the judicial reason, these announced the 
leader of the American bar, with every faculty and 
every accomplishment by which he had won that proud 
title, wholly unimpaired ; the eye not dim nor the 
natural force abated. 

I cannot here and now trace, with any minuteness, 
the course of Mr. Webster at the bar during these 
forty-eight years from the opening of his office in 
Boscawen ; nor convey any impression whatever of the 
aggregate of labor which that course imposed ; or of 
the intellectual power which it exacted ; nor indicate 
the stages of his rise ; nor define the time when his 
position at the summit of the profession may be said 
to haye become completely vindicated. You know, in 
general, that he began the practice of the law in New 
Hampshire in the spring of 1805; that he prosecuted 
it, here, in its severest school, with great diligence, and 
brilliant success, among competitors of larger experi- 
ence and of consummate ability, until 1810: that he 
then removed to Massachusetts, and that there, in the 
courts of that State, and of other States, and in those 
of the genei'al government, and especially in the Su- 
preme Court sitting at Washington, he pursued it as 
the calling by which he was to earn his daily bread, 
until he died. You know indeed that he did not 
pursue it exactly as one pursues it who confines himself 

3 



26 

to an office ; and seeks to do the current and miscella- 
neous business of a single bar. His professional em- 
ployment, as I have often heard him say, was very 
much the preparation of opinions on important ques- 
tion!^, presented from every part of the country ; and 
the trial of causes. This kind of professional life 
allowed him seasonable vacations ; and it accommodated 
itself somewhat to the exactions of his other and public 
life. But it was all one long and continued practice 
of the law ; the professional character was never put 
off; nor the professional robe long un^^•x)rn to the 
last. 

You know, too, his character as a jurist. This topic 
has been recently and separatelj^ treated, with great 
ability, by one in a high degree competent to the task ; 
the late learned Chief Justice of New Hampshire, now 
Professor of Law at Cambridge ; and it needs no addi- 
tional illustration from me. Yet, let me say, that 
herein, also, the first thing which strikes you is the 
union of diverse, and, as I have said, what might have 
been regarded incompatible excellences. I shall sub- 
mit it to the judgment of the universal American bar, 
if a carefully prepared opinion of Mr. Webster, on any 
question of law whatever in the whole range of our 
jurisprudence, would not be accepted everywhere as of 
the most commanding authority, and as the highest 
evidence of legal truth ? I submit it to that same judg- 
ment, if for many years before his death, they would 
not have rather chosen to intrust the maintenance and 
enforcement of any important proposition of law what- 



27 

ever, before any legal tribunal of character whatever, 
to his best exertion of his faculties, than to any other 
ability which the whole wealth of the profession could 
supply? 

And this alone completes the description of a lawyer 
and a forensic orator of the first rate ; but it does not 
complete the description of his professional character. 
By the side of all this, so to speak, there was that whole 
class of qualities which made him for any description of 
trial by jury whatever, criminal or civil, by even a more 
universal assent, foremost. For that form of trial no 
faculty v\'as unused or needless; but you were most 
struck there to see the nnrivalled legal reason put off, 
as it were, and reappear in the form of a robust com- 
mon sense and eloquent feeling, applying itself to an 
exciting subject of business; to see the knowledge of 
men and life by which the falsehood and veracity of 
witnesses, the probabilities and improbabilities of trans- 
actions as sworn to, were discerned in a moment ; the 
direct, plain, forcible speech ; the consummate narrative, 
a department which he had particularly cultivated, and 
in which no man ever excelled him ; the easy and per- 
fect analysis by which he conveyed his side of the cause 
to the mind of the jury ; the occasional gush of strong 
feeling, indignation, or pity ; the masterly, yet natural 
way, in which all the moral emotions of which his cause 
was susceptible, were called to use, the occasional sove- 
reignty of dictation to which his convictions seemed 
spontaneously to rise. His efforts in trials by jury com- 
pose a more traditional and evanescent part of his pro- 



28 

fessional reputation than his arguments on questions of 
law ; but I aUnost think they were his mightiest profes- 
sional displays, or displays of any kind, after all. 

One such I stood in a relation to witness with a com- 
paratively easy curiosity, and yet with intimate and 
professional knowledge of all the embarrassments of the 
case. It was the trial of John Francis Knapp, charged 
with being present, aiding, and abetting in the murder 
of Joseph Wiiite, in which Mr. Webster conducted the 
prosecution for the Commonwealth ; in the same year 
with his reply to Mr. Hayne, in the Senate ; and a few 
months later ; and when I bring to mind the incidents 
of that trial: the necessity of proving that the prisoner 
was near enough to the chamber in which the murder 
was being committed by another hand to aid in the act j 
and was there with the intention to do so, and thus in 
point of law did aid in it — because mere accessorial 
guilt was not enough to convict him ; the difficulty of 
proving this — because the nearest point to which the 
evidence could trace him was still so distant as to war- 
rant a pretty formidable doubt whether mere curiosity 
had not carried him thither ; and whether he could in 
-any useful, or even conceivable manner have cooperated 
with the actual murderer, if he had intended to do so ; 
and because the only mode of rendering it probable 
that he was there with a purpose of guilt was by show- 
ing that he was one of the parties to a conspiracy of 
murder, whose very existence, actors, and objects, had to 
be made out by the colhition of the widest possible 
range of circumstances — some of them pretty loose — 



29 

and even if he was a conspirator it did not quite neces- 
sarily follow that any active participation was assigned 
to him for his jiart, any more than to his brother, who, 
confessedly took no such part — the great number of 
witnesses to be examined and cross-examined, a duty 
devolving wholly on him; the quick and sound judg- 
ment demanded and supplied to determine what to use 
and what to reject of a mass of rather unmanageable 
materials; the points in the law of evidence to be 
argued — in the course of which he made an appeal to 
the Bench on the complete impunity which the rejection 
of the prisoner's confession would give to the murder, 
in a style of dignity and energy, I should rather say, of 
grandeur which I never heard him equal before or after; 
the high ability and fidelity with which every part of 
the defence was conducted; and the great final sum- 
ming up to which he brought, and in which he needed, 
the utmost exertion of every faculty he possessed to 
persuade the jury that the obligation of that duty the 
sense of which, he said, " pursued us ever : it is omni- 
present like the Deity : if we take the wings of the 
morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
duty performed or duty violated is still with us for our 
happiness or misery " — to persuade them that this oljli- 
gation demanded that on his proofs they shoul^l convict 
the prisoner : to which he brought lirst the profound be- 
lief of his guilt, without which he could not have prose- 
cuted him; then skill consummate in i.ispiring them 
with a desire or a willingness to be instrumental in de- 
tecting that guilt ; and to lean on h'm in the efibrt to 

3:5: 



30 

detect it ; then every resource of profession<al ability to 
break the force of the propositions of the defence, and 
to estabhsh the truth of his own : inferring a conspiracy 
to which the prisoner was a party, from circumstances 
acutely ridiculed by the able counsel opposing him as 
"Stuff" — but woven by him into strong and uniform 
tissue ; and then bridging over from the conspiracy to 
the not very necessary inference that the particular con- 
spirator on trial Avas at his post, in execution of it, 
to aid and abet — the picture of the murder with which 
he begun — not for rhetorical display, but to inspire 
solemnity, and horror, and a desire to detect and punish 
for justice and for security ; the sublime exhortation to 
duty with which he closed — resting on the universality, 
and authoritativeness and eternity of its obligation — 
which left in every juror's mind the impression that it 
was the duty of convicting in this particular case the 
sense of which would be with him in the hour of death, 
and in the judgment, and forever — with these recollec- 
tions of that trial I cannot help thinking it a more diffi- 
cult and higher effort of mind than that more flxmous 
^' Oration for the Crown." 

It would be not unpleasing nor inappropriate to pause, 
and recall the names of some of that succession of com- 
petitors Ly whose rivalry the several stages of his pro- 
fessional lii'} were honored and exercised ; and of some 
of the eminent judicial persons who presided over that 
various and i>igh contention. Time scarcely permits 
this; but in tht briefest notice I must take occasion to 
say that perhaps the most important influence — cer- 



31 

tainly the most important early influence — on his pro- 
fessional traits and fortunes, was that exerted hy the 
great general 'ahilities, impressive character, and legal 
genius of Mr. Mason. Who he was you all know. How 
much the jurisprudence of New Hampshire owes to him ; 
what deep traces he left on it ; how much he did to 
promote the culture, and to preserve the integrity of the 
old common law ; to adapt it to your wants, and your 
institutions; and to construct a system of practice by 
which it was administered with extraordinary energy 
and effectiveness for the discovery of truth, and the 
enforcement of right ; you of the legal profession of this 
state will ever be proud to acknowledge. Another 
forum in a neighboring commonwealth, witnessed and 
profited by the last labors, and enlarged studies of the 
consummate lawyer and practiser ; and at an earlier day 
the Senate, the country, had recognized his vast practi- 
cal wisdom and sagacity, the fruit of the highest intel- 
lectual endowments, matured thought, and profound 
observation ; his fidelity to the obligations of that party 
connection to which he was attached; his fidelity through 
all his life, still more conspicuous, and still more admi- 
rable, to the hii2;licr oblii^ations of a considerate and en- 
larged patriotism. He had been more than fourteen 
years at the bar, when Mr. "Webster came to it ; he dis- 
cerned instantly what manner of man his youthful com- 
petitor was; ho admitted hiui to his intimate friendship; 
and paid him the unequivocal compliment, and did him 
the real kindness of compelling him to the utmost exer- 
tion of his diligence and capacity by calling out against 



32 

him all his own. " The proprieties of this occasion " — 
these are Mr. Webster's words in presenting the resolu- 
tions of the Suffolk Bar upon Mr. Mason's death — " com- 
pel me, with whatever reluctance, to refrain from the 
indulgence of the personal feelings which arise in my 
heart upon the death of one with whom I have culti- 
vatad a sincere, affectionate, and unbroken friendship from 
the day when I commenced my own professional career 
to the closing hour of his life. I will not say of the ad- 
vantao;es which I have derived from his intercourse and 
conversation all that Mr. Fox said of Edmund Burke, 
but I am bound to say, that of my own professional dis- 
cipline and attainments, whatever they may be, I owe 
much to that close attention to the discharge of my du- 
ties which I was compelled to pay for nine successive 
years, from day to day, by Mr. Mason's efforts and argu- 
ments at the same bar. I must have been unintelligent 
indeed, not to have learned something from the constant 
displays of that power wdiich I had so much occasion to 
see and feel." 

I reckon next to his, for the earlier time of his life, 
the influence of the learned and accomplished Smith; 
and next to these — some may believe greater — is that 
of Mr. Justice Story. That extraordinary person had 
been admitted to the bar in Essex in Massachusetts in 
1801 ; and he was engaged in many trials in the county 
of Rockingham in this state before Mr. Webster had as- 
sumed his own established position. Their jDolitical 
opinions differed ; but such was his affluence of know- 
ledge already ; such his stimulant enthusiasm ; he was 



33 

burning with so incredible a passion for learning, and 
fame, that the influence on the still young Webster was 
instant ; and it was great and permanent. It was re- 
ciprocal too ; and an intimacy began that attended the 
whole course of honor through which each, in his several 
sphere, ascended. Parsons he saw, also, but rarely ; and 
Dexter oftener, and with more nearness of observation, 
while yet laying the foundation of his own mind and 
character; and he shared largely in the universal admi- 
ration of that time, and of this, of their attainments, and 
genius, and diverse greatness. 

As he came to the grander practice of the national 
bar, other competition was to be encountered. Other 
names begin to solicit us ; other contention ; higher 
prizes. It would be quite within the proprieties of this 
discourse to remember the parties, at least, to some of 
the higher causes, by wdiich his ultimate professional 
fame was built up ; even if I could not hope to convey 
any impression of the novelty and difficulty of the 
questions which they involved, or of the positive addi- 
tion which the argument, and judgment, made to the 
treasures of our constitutional and general jurispru- 
dence. But there is only one of which I have time 
to say any thing, and that is the case which established 
the inviolability of the charter of Dartmouth College 
by the Legislature of the State of New Hampshire. 
Acts of the Legislature, passed in the 3'ear 1810, had 
invaded its charter. A suit was brouo-ht to test their 
validity. It was tried in the Supreme Court of the 
State; a judgment was given against the College, and 



34 

this ^Yas appealed to the Supreme Federal Court by 
writ of error. Upon solemn argument the charter was 
decided to be a contract whose obligation a State may 
not impair ; the acts were decided to be invalid as an 
attempt to impair it, and you hold your charter under 
that decision to-day. How much Mr. Webster con- 
tributed to that result, how much the effort advanced 
his own distinction at the bar, you all know. Well, 
as if of 3'esterday, I remember how it was Avritten 
home from Washington, that " Mr. Webster closed a 
legal argument of great power by a peroration which 
charmed and melted his audience." Often since I have 
heard vague accounts, not much more satisfactory, of 
the speech and the scene. I was aware that the report 
of his argument, as it was published, did not contain 
the actual peroration, and I supposed it lost forever. 
By the great kindness of a learned and excellent per- 
son, Dr. Chauncy A. Goodrich, a professor in Yale 
College, with whom I had not the honor of acquaint- 
ance, although his virtues, accomplishments, and most 
useful life, were well known to me, I can read to you 
the words whose power, when those lips spoke them, 
so many owned, although they could not repeat them. 
As those lips spoke them, we shall hear them never- 
more, but no utterance can extinguish their simple, 
sweet, and perfect beauty. Let me first, bring the 
general scene before you, and then you will hear the 
rest in Mr. Goodrich's description. It was in 1818, in 
the thirty-seventh year of Mr. Webster's age. It was 
addressed to a tribunal presided over by Marshall, 



35 



assisted by Washington, Livingston, Johnson, Stoiy, 
Todd, and Duvall — a tribunal unsurpassed on earth 
in all that gives illustration to a bench of law, and 
sustained and venerated by a noble bar. He had V 
called to his aid the ripe and beautiful culture of 
Hopkiuson; and of his opponents was William Wirt, 
then and ever of the leaders of the bar, who, with 
faculties and accomplishments fitting him to adorn and 
guide public life, abounding in deep professional learn- 
ing, and in the most various and elegant- acquisitions — 
a ripe and splendid orator, made so by genius and the 
most assiduous culture — consecrated all to the service 
of the law. It was before that tribunal, and in pre- 
sence of an audience select and critical, among whom, 
it is to be borne in mind, were some graduates of the 
college, who were attending to assist against her, that 
he opened the cause. I gladly proceed in the words 
of Mr. Goodrich. 

" Before going to Washington, which I did chiefly for 
the sake of hearing Mr. Webster, I was told that, in 
arguing the case at Exeter, New Hampshire, he had left 
the whole court-room in tears at the conclusion of his 
speech. This, I confess, struck me unjDleasantly — any 
attempt at pathos on a purely legal question like this, 
seemed hardly in good taste. On my way to Washing- 
ton, I made the acquaintance of Mr. Webster. We were 
together for several days in Philadelphia, at the house 
of a common friend ; and as the College question was 
one of deep interest to literary men, we conversed often 



36 

and largely on the subject. As he dwelt upon the lead- 
ing points of the case, in terms so calm, simple, and pre- 
cise, I said to myself more than once, in reference to 
the story I had heard, ' "Whatever may have seemed ap- 
propriate in defending the College at home, and on her 
own ground, there will be no appeal to the feelings of 
Jud52:e Marshall and his associates at Washinui-ton.' The 
Supreme Court of the United States held its session, 
that -winter, in a mean apartment of moderate size — 
the Capitol not having been built after its destruction 
in 1814. The audience, when the case came on, was 
therefore small, consisting chiefly of legal men, the elite 
of the profession throughout the country. Mr. Webster 
entered upon his argument in the calm tone of easy 
and di2;nified conversation. His matter was so com- 
pletely at his command that he scarcely looked at his 
brief, but went on for more than four hours with a 
statement so luminous, and a chain of reasoning so easy 
to be understood, and yet approaching so nearly to ab- 
solute demonstration, that he seemed to carry with him 
every man of his audience without the slightest effort 
or weariness on either side. It was hardly eloquence, in 
the stiict sense of the term ; it was pure reason. Now 
and then, for a sentence or two, his eye flashed and his 
voice swelled into a bolder note, as he uttered some em- 
phatic thought; but he instantly fell back into the tone 
of earnest conversation, which ran throughout the great 
body of his speech. A single circumstance will show 
you the clearness and absorbing power of his argument. 
" I observed that Judge Story, at the opening of the 



37 

case, had prepared himself, pen in hand, as if to take 
copious minutes. Hour after hour I saw him fixed in 
the same attitude, but, so far as I could perceive, with 
not a note on his paper. The argument closed, and / 
could not discover that he had talien a single note. Others 
around me remarked the same thing, and it was among 
the on dits of Washington, that a friend spoke to him of 
the fact with surprise, when the Judge remarked, ' every 
thing was so clear, and so easy to remember, that not 
a note seemed necessary, and, in fact, I thought little or 
nothing about my notes.' 

" The argument ended. Mr. Webster stood for some 
moments silent before the Court, while every eye was 
fixed intently upon him. At length, addressing the 
Chief Justice, Marshall, he proceeded thus : — 

" ' This, Sir, is my case ! It is the case, not merely of 
that humble institution, it is the case of every College 
in our land. It is more. It is the case of every Elee- 
mosynary Institution throughout our country — of all 
those great charities founded by the piety of our ances- 
tors to alleviate human misery, and scatter blessings 
along the pathway of life. It is more ! It is, in some 
sense, the case of every man among us w^ho has pro- 
perty of which he may be stripped, for the question is 
simply this : Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to 
take that which is not their own, to turn it from its 
original use, and appl^^ it to such ends or purposes as 
they, in their discretion, shall see fit ! 

"^Sir, you may destroy this little Institution; it is 

weak ; it is in your hands ! I know it is one of the 

4 



38 

lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. 
You may put it out. But if you do so, you must carry 
through your work ! You must extinguish, one after 
another, all those great lights of science which, for more 
than a century, have thrown their radiance over our 
land ! 

" * It is. Sir, as I have said, a small College. And yet, 

there are those who love it .' 

" Here the feelings which he had thus far succeeded in 
keeping down, broke forth. His lips quivered ; his firm 
cheeks trembled with emotion ; his eyes were filled with 
tears, his voice choked, and he seemed struggling to the 
utmost simj)ly to gain that mastery over himself which 
might save him from an unmanly burst of feeling. I 
will not attempt to give you the few broken words of 
tenderness in which he went on to speak of his attach- 
ment to the College. The whole seemed to be mingled 
throughout with the recollections of father, mother, 
brother, and all the trials and privations through which 
he had made his way into life. Every one saw that it 
was wholly unpremeditated, a pressure on his heart, 
which sought relief in words and tears. 

" The court room during these two or three minutes 
presented an extraordinary spectacle. Chief Justice 
Marshall, with his tall and gaunt figure bent over as if 
, to catch the slightest whisper, the deep furrows of his 
cheek expanded with emotion, and eyes sufiiised with 
tears ; Mr. Justice Washington at his side, with his small 
and emaciated frame and countenance more like marble 
than I ever saw on any other human being — leaning 



39 

forward with an eager, troubled look ; and the remain- 
der of the Court, at the two extremities, pressing, as it 
were, toward a single point, while the audience below 
were wrapping themselves round in closer folds beneath 
the bench to catch each look, and every movement of 
the speaker's face. If a painter could give us the scene 
on canvas — those forms and countenances, and Daniel 
Webster a.s he then stood in the midst, it would be one 
of the most touching pictures in the history of eloquence. 
One thing it taught me, that the pathetic depends not 
merely on the words uttered, but still more on the 
estimate we put upon him who utters them. There was 
not one among the strong-minded men of that assembly 
who could think it unmanly to weep, when he saw 
standing before him the man who had made such an 
argument, melted into the tenderness of a child. 

" Mr. Webster had now recovered his composure, and 
fixing his keen eye on the Chief Justice, said, in that 
deep tone wdth which he sometimes thrilled the heart of 
an audience : — 

"'Sir, I know not how others may feel,' (glancing at 
the opponents of the College before him,) ' but, for my- 
self, when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar 
in the senate house, by those who are reiterating stab 
upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her 
turn to me, and say, Et in quoqtie mi fli ! And thou 
too, my son ! ' 

"He sat down. There was a deathlike stillness 
throughout the room for some moments; every one 
seemed to be slowly recovering himself, and coming 



40 



gradually back to his ordinary range of thought and 



feeling." 



r 



It was while Mr. Webster was ascending through the 
long gradations of the legal profession to its highest 
L-ank, that by a parallel series of display on a stage, and 
in parts totally distinct, by other studies, thoughts, and 
actions he rose also to be at his death the first of Amer- 
ican Statesmen. The last of the mighty rivals was 
dead before, and he stood alone. Give this aspect also 
of his greatness a passing glance. His public life began 
in May 1813, in the House of Representatives in Con- 
gress, to which this State had elected him. It ended 
when he died. If you except the interval between his 
removal from New Hampshire and his election in Massa- 
chusetts, it was a public life of forty years. By what 
political morality, and by what enlarged patriotism, em- 
bracing the whole country, that life was guided, I shall 
consider hereafter. Let me now fix your attention 
rather on the magnitude and variety and actual value 
of the service. Consider that from the day he went 
upon the Committee of Foreign Relations, in 1813, in 
time of war, and more and more, the longer he lived 
and the higher he rose, he was a man whose great 
talents and devotion to public duty placed and kept 
him in a position of associated or sole command ; com- 
mand in the political connection to which he belonged, 
command in opposition, command in power ; and appre- 
ciate the responsibilities which that implies, what care, 
what prudence, what mastery of the whole ground — 



41 

exacting for tlic conduct of a party, as Gibbon says of 
Fox, abilities and civil discretion equal to tlic conduct 
of an empire. Consider the work he did in that life of 
forty 3'ears — the range of subjects investigated and 
discussed : composing the whole theory and practice of 
our organic and administrative politics, foreign and do- 
mestic : the vast body of instructive thought he pro- 
duced and put in j)Ossession of the country ; how much 
he achieved in congress as well as at the bar, to fix the 
true inter^Dretation, as well as to impress the transcen- 
dent value of the constitution itself, as much altogether 
as any jurist or statesman since its adoption ; how much 
to establish in the general mind the great doctrine that 
the government of the United States is a government 
proper, established by the people of the States, not a 
compact between sovereign communities, — that within 
its limits it is supreme, and that whether it is within its 
limits or not, in any given exertion of itself, is to be 
determined by the Supreme Court of the United States 
— the ultimate arbiter in the last resort — from which 
there is no appeal but to revolution ; how much he did 
in the course of the discussions which grew out of the 
proposed mission to Panama, and, at a later day, out of 
the removal of the deposits, to place the executive 
department of the government on its true basis, and 
under its true limitations ; to secure to that department 
all its just powers on the one hand, and on the other 
hand to vindicate to the legislative department, -smd 
especially' to the senate, all that belong to them; to 
arrest the tendencies which he thought at one time 

4* 



42 



tlireatenecl to substitute the government of a single 
will, of a single person of great force of character and 
boundless popularity, and of a numerical majority of 
the people, told by the head, without intermediate insti- 
tutions of any kind, judicial or senatorial, in place of 
the elaborate system of checks and balances, by which 
the constitution aimed at a government of laws, and not 
of men ; how much, attracting less popular attention, 
but scarcely less important, to complete the great work 
which experience had shown to be left unfinished by 
the judiciary act of 1789, by providing for the punish- 
ment of all crimes against the United States; how 
much for securing a safe currency and a true financial 
system, not only by the promulgation of sound opinions, 
but by good specific measures adopted, or bad ones 
defeated; how much to develop the vast material re- 
sources of the country, and to push forward the plant- 
ing of the West — not troubled hy any fear of exhausting 
old States — by a liberal policy of public lands, by 
vindicating the constitutional power of Congress to 
make or aid in making large classes of internal improve- 
ments, and by acting on that doctrine uniformly from 
1813, whenever a road was to be built, or a rapid sup- 
pressed, or a canal to be opened, or a breakwater or 
a lighthouse set up above or below the flow of the tide, 
if so far beyond the ability of a single state, or of so 
wide utility to commerce and labor as to rise to the 
rank of a work general in its influences — another tie 
of union because another proof of the beneficence of 
union; how much to protect the vast mechanical and 



43 

manufacturing interests of the country, a value of many 
hundreds of millions — after having been lured into 
existence against his counsels, against his science of 
political economy, by a policy of artificial encourage- 
ment — from being sacrificed, and the pursuits and plans 
of large regions and communities broken up, and the 
acquired skill of the country squandered by a sudden 
and capricious withdrawal of the promise of the govern- 
ment ; how much for the right performance of the most 
delicate and difficult of all tasks, the ordering of the 
foreign affairs of a nation, free, sensitive, self-conscious, 
recognizing, it is true, public law and a morality of the 
State, binding on the conscience of the State, yet aspir- 
ing to power, eminence, and command, its whole frame 
filled full and all on fire with American feeling, sympa- 
thetic with liberty everywhere — how much for the 
ricrht orderino; of the foreio;n affairs of such a State — 
aiming in all his policy, from his speech on the Greek 
question in 1823, to his letters to M. Hulsemann in 
1850, to occupy the high, plain, yet dizzy groimd which 
separates influence from intervention, to avow and pro- 
mulgate warm good will to humanity, wdierever striving 
to be free, to inquire authentically into the history of 
its struggles, to take official and avowed pains to ascer- 
tain the moment when its success may be recognized, 
consistently, ever, with the great code that keeps the 
peace of the world, abstaining from every thing which 
shall give any nation a right under the law of nations 
to utter one word of complaint, still less to retaliate by 
war — the sympathy, but also the neutrality, of "Wash- 



44 

\ ington — how mucli to compose witli honor a concur- 
\ rence of difficulties with the first power in the world, 
I which any thing less than the highest degree of discre- 
j tion, firmness, ability, and means of commanding respect 
and confidence at home and abroad would inevitably 
have conducted to the last calamity — a disputed boun- 
dary line of many hundred miles, from the St. Croix to 
' the Rocky Mountains, which divided an exasperated and 
impracticable border population, enlisted the pride and 
affected the interests and controlled the politics of par- 
ticular States, as well as pressed on the peace and honor 
of the nation, which the most popular administrations 
of the era of the quietest and best public feelings, the 
times of Monroe and of Jackson, could not adjust; 
which had grown so complicated with other toj)ics of 
excitement that one false step, right or left, would have 
been a step down a precipice — this line settled forever 
— the claim of England to search our ships for the sup- 
pression of the slave-trade silenced forever, and a new 
engagement entered into by treaty, binding the national 
faith to contribute a specific naval force for putting an 
end to the great crime of man — the long practice of 
England to enter an American ship and impress from its 
crew, terminated forever ; the deck henceforth guarded 
sacredly and completely b}^ the flag — how much ])y 
profound discernment, by eloquent speech, by devoted 
life to strengthe the ties of Union, and breathe the 
fine and strong spirit of nationality through all our 
numbers — how much, most of all, last of all, after the 
war with Mexico, needless if his counsels had governed. 



45 

had ended in so vast an acquisition of territory, in pre- 
senting to the two great antagonist sections of our 
country so vast an area to enter on, so imperial a prize 
to contend for, and the accursed fraternal strife had 
begun — how much then, when rising to the measure of 
a true, and difficult, and rare greatness, remembering 
that he had a country to save as well as a local constitu- 
ency to gratify, laying all the wealth, all the hopes, of 
an illustrious life on the altar of a hazardous patriotism, 
he sought and won the more exceeding glory which now 
attends — wdiicli in the next age shall more conspicu- 
ously attend — his name who composes an agitated and 
saves a sinking land — recall this series of conduct and 
influences, study them carefully in their facts and results 
— the reading of years — and you attain to a true 
appreciation of this aspect of his greatness — his public 
character and life. 

For such a review the eulogy of an hour has no 
room. Such a task demands research ; details ; proofs ; 
illustrations ; a long labor — a volume of history com- 
posed according to her severest laws — setting down 
nothing, depreciating nothing, in n alignity to the 
dead; suppressing nothing and falsifying nothing in 
adulation of the dead ; professing fidelity incorrupt — 
unswerved by hatred or by love, yet able to measure, 
able to glow in the contemplation of a true greatness 
and a vast and varied and useful public life ; such a 
history as the genius and judgment and delicate pri- 
vate and public morality of Everett — assisted by his 
perfect 1 nowledge of the facts — not disqualified by 



-\ 



46 

his long friendship imchilled to the last hour — such 
a history as he might construct. 

Two or three suggestions, occurring on the most 
general observation of this asj^ect of his eminence, you 
"vvill tolerate as I leave the topic. 

Remark how very large a proportion of all this class 
of his acts, are wholly beyond, and outside, of the 
profession of the law ; demanding studies, experience, 
a turn of mind, a cast of qualities and character, such 
as that profession neither gives, nor exacts. Some 
single speeches in Congress of consummate ability, 
have been made by great lawyers, drawing for the 
purpose, only on the learning, accomplishments, logic, 
and eloquence of the forum. Such was Chief Justice, 
then Mr. Marshall's argument in the case of Jonathan 
Robbins — turning on the interpretation of a treaty, 
and the constitutional power of the executive; a de- 
monstration if there is any in Euclid — anticipating the 
masterly judgments in the cause of Dartmouth College, 
or of Gibbons and Ogden, or of Maculloch and the 
State of Maryland; but such an one as a law^^er like 
him — if another there was — could have made in his 
professional capacit}^ at the bar of the House, although 
he had never reflected on practical politics an hour in 
his life. Such somewhat was William Pinkney's speech 
in the House of Representatives on the treaty-making 
power, in 1815, and his two more splendid displays, in 
the Senate, on the Missouri question, in 1820, the last 
of which I heard Mr. Clay pronounce the greatest he 
ever heard. They w^ere pieces of legal reasoning, on 



47 

questions of constitutional kw ; decorated of course by 
a rhetoric which Ilortensius might have envied, and 
Cicero would not have despised ; but they were pro- 
fessional at last. To some extent this is true of some 
of Mr. Webster's ablest speeches in Congress ; or, more 
accurately, of some of the more important portions of 
some of his ablest. I should say so of a part of that 
on the Panama Mission; of the reply to Mr. Hayne 
even; and of almost the whole of that reply to Mr. 
Calhoun on the thesis, " the Constitution not a compact 
between sovereign States ; " the whole series of discus- 
sion of the constitutional power of the Executive, and 
the constitutional power of the Senate, growing out 
of the removal of the deposites and the supposed ten- 
dencies of our system towards a centralization of gov- 
ernment in a President, and a majority of the peoj)le — 
marked, all of them, by amazing ability. To these the 
lawyer who could demonstrate that the Charter of this 
College is a contract within the Constitution, or that 
the Steamboat Monopoly usurped upon the executed 
power of Congress to regulate connnerce, was already 
equal — but to have been the leader, or of the leaders of 
his political connection for thirty years ; to have been 
able to instruct and guide on every question of policy 
as well as law, which interested the nation in all that 
time ; every question of finance ; of currency ; of the 
lands; of the development and care of our resources and 
labor ; to have been of strength to help to lead his 
country by the hand, up to a position of iniluence and 
attraction on the highest places of earth, yet to keep 



48 

lier peace, and to keep her honor ; to have been able 
to emulate the prescrijDtive and awful renown of the 
founders of States by domg something which will be 
admitted, when some generations have passed, even 
more than now, to have contributed to preserve the 
State — for all this another man was needed — and he 
stands forth another and the same. 

I am hereafter to speak separately of the political 
morality which guided him ever, but I w^ould say a 
word now on two portions of his public life, one of 
which has been the subject of accusatory, the other 
of disparaging criticism, unsound — unkind — in both in- 
stances. 

The first comprises his course in regard to a protec- 
tive policy. He opposed a tariff of protection it is said, 
in 1816, and 1820, and 1824 ; and he opposed, in 1828, 
a sudden and fatal repeal of such a tariff; and there- 
upon I have seen it written that " this proved him a 
, man with no great comprehensive ideas of political 
\ economy ; who took the fleeting interests, and transient 
I opinions of the hour for his norms of conduct;" "who 
j had no sober and serious convictions of his own." I 
! have seen it more decorously written, " that his ojoinions 
on this subject were not determined by general prin- 
ciples, but by a consideration of immediate sectional 
interests." 

I will not answer this by what Scaligcr says of Lipsius, 
the arrogant pedant who dogmatized on the deeper poli- 
tics as he did on the text of Tacitus and Seneca. JS^cqiie 
est poUticiis ; nee potest qiiieqiiam in poliiid ; nihil p>osmnt pe- 



49 

dailies in ipsis rebus : nee ego, nee alius doetus 23ossumus scribere 
in politicis. I say only that the case totally fails to give 
color to the charge. The reasonings of Mr. Webster in 
1816, 1820, and 1824, express, that on mature reflection, 
and due and appropriate studj- he had embraced the 
opinion that it was needless and unwise to force Ameri- 
can manufactures, by regulation, prematurely to life. 
Bred in a commercial community ; taught from his ear- 
liest hours of thought to regard the care of commerce 
as, in point of fact, a leading object and cause of the 
Union : to observe around him no other forms of ma- 
terial industry than those of commerce ; navigation ; 
fisheries ; agriculture, and a few plain and robust me- 
chanical arts, he would come to the study of the political 
I economy of the subject with a certain preoccupation of 
1 mind perhaps ; so coming he did study it at its well 
heads, and he adopted his conclusions sincerely, and 
announced them strongly. 

His opinions w^ere overruled by Congress ; and a 
national policy was adopted, holding out all conceivable 
promise of permanence, under which vast and sensitive 
investments of capital were made ; the expectations, the 
employments, the habits, of whole ranges of States were 
recast ; an industry, new to us, springing, immature, had 
been advanced just so far, that if deserted, at that 
moment, there must follow a squandering of skill ; 
a squandering of property ; an aggregate of destruction, 
senseless, needless, and unconscientious — such as marks 
the worst form of revolution. On these facts, at a later 
day, he thought that that industry, the cliild of Govern- 

5 



50 

mcnt, should not thus capriciously be deserted. " The 
dut}' of the government," he said, " at the present mo- 
ment would seem to be to preserve, not to destroy ; to 
maintain the position which it has assumed ; and for one 
I shall feel it an indispensable obligation to hold it 
steady, as far as in my power, to that degree of protec- 
tion which it has undertaken to bestow." 

And does this prove that these original opinions were 
hasty ; shallow ; insincere ; unstudied ? Consistently 
with every one of them ; consistently with the true 
spirit, and all the aims, of the science of political econ- 
omy itself; consistently w^ith every duty of sober, high, 
earnest, and moral statesmanship, might not he who 
resisted the making of a tariff in 1816, deprecate its 
abandonment in 1828 ? Does not Adam Smith himself 
admit that it is ^^ matter Jit for deliberation how far or in 
what manner, it may be proper to restore that free im- 
portation after it has been for some time interrupted ? " 
implying that a general principle of national wealth 
may be displaced or modified by special circumstances 
— but would these censors therefore cry out that he 
had no " great and comprehensive ideas of political econ- 
omy," and was willing to be " determined not by gene- 
ral principles, but by immediate interests?" Because a 
father advises his son against an early and injudicious 
marriage ; does it logically follow, or is it ethically right, 
that after his advice has been disregarded, he is to 
recommend desertion of the young wife, and the young 
child? I do not appreciate the beauty and "compre- 
hensiveness" of those scientific ideas which forget that 



51 

the actual and vast "interests" of the community are 
exactly what the legislator has to protect ; that the con- 
crete of things must limit the foolish wantonness of a 
fviori theory ; that that department of politics, which 
has for its object the promotion and distribution of the 
wealth of nations, may very consistently, and very sci- 
entifically preserve what it would not have created. He 
who accuses Mr. Webster in this behalf of " having no 
sober and serious convictions of his own," must afford 
some other proof than his opposition to the introduction 
of a policy ; and then his willingness to protect it after 
it had been introduced, and five hundred millions of 
property, or, however, a countless sum had been invested 
imder it, or become dependent on its continuance. 

I should not think that I consulted his true fiime if I 
did not add that as he came to observe the practical 
Avorkings of the protective policy more closely than at 
first he had done ; as he came to observe the working and 
influences of a various manufacturing and mechanical 
labor ; to see how it emploj^s and develops every facul- 
ty ; finds occupation for every hour ; creates or difflises 
and disciplines ingenuity, gathering up every fragment 
of mind and time so that nothing be lost ; how a steady 
and ample home market assists agriculture ; how all the 
great emploj-ments of man are connected by a kindred 
tie, so that the tilling of the land, navigation, foreign, 
coastwise and interior connnerce, all grow with the 
errowth, and strencjthen with the strength of the iudus- 
try of the arts — he came to appreciate, more adequately 
than at first, how this form of labor contributes to wealth j 



52 

power ; eiijojnnent ; a great civilization ; he came more 
justly to grasp the conception of how consummate a de- 
struction it would cause — how senseless, how unphilo- 
sophical, how immoral — to arrest it suddenly and capri- 
ciously — after it had been lured into life ; how wiser — 
how fir truer to the principles of the science which seeks 
to augment the wealth of the State, to refuse to destroy 
so immense an accumulation of that wealth. In this 
sense, and in this way, I believe his opinions were ma- 
tured and modified ; but it does not quite follow that 
they were not, in every period, conscientiously formed 
and held, or that they were not in the actual circum- 
stances of each period philosophically just, and practi- 
cally wise. 
I The other act of his public life to which I alluded is 
his negotiation of the Treaty of Washington, in 1842, 
with Great Britain. This act, the country, the world, 
has judged, and has applauded. Of his administrative 
ability ; his discretion ; temper ; civil courage ; his power 
of exacting respect and confidence from those with whom 
he communicated ; and of influencing their reason ; his 
knowledge of the true interests and true grandeur of the 
two great parties to the negotiation ; of the States of 
the Union more immediately concerned, and of the 
world whose chief concern is peace ; and of the intre- 
pidity with which he encountered the disappointed feel- 
ings, and disparaging criticisms of the hour, in the con- 
sciousness that he had done a good and large deed, and 
earned a permanent and honest renown — of these it is 
the truest and most fortunate single exemplification 



53 

which remains of him. Concerning its difficulty, impor- 
tance and merits of all sorts, there Avere at the time, few 
dissenting" opinions among those most conversant with 
the subject, although there were some ; to-day there are 
fewer still. They are so few — a single sneer by the 
side of his grave, expressing that " a man who makes 
such a bargain is not entitled to any great glory among 
diplomatists," is all that I can call to mind — that I will 
not arrest the course of your feelings here and now by 
attempting to refute that " sneer " out of the history of 
the hour and scene. " Standing here," he said in April, 
1846, in the Senate of the United States to which he 
had returned — " standing here to-day, in this Senate, 
and speaking in behalf of the administration of which I 
formed a part, and in behalf of the two houses of Con- 
gress who sustained that administration, cordially and ef- 
fectively, in every thing relating to this treat}^, I am will- 
ing to appeal to the public men of the age, whether in 
1842, and in the city of Washington, something was not 
done for the suppression of crime ; for the true exposition 
of the principles of public law ; for the freedom and secu- 
rity of commerce on the ocean, and for the peace of the 
world ! " In that forum the appeal has been heard, and 
the praise of a diplomatic achievement of true and per- 
manent glorj^, has been irreversibly awarded to him. 
Beyond that forum of the mere " public men of the age," 
by the larger jurisdiction, the general public, the same 
praise has been awarded. jSuiii hie ctiam sua prwmia laiidi. 
That which I had the honor to say in the Senate, in the 
session of 1843, in a discussion concerning this treaty. 



54 

is true, and applicable, now as then. " Why should I, or 
why should any one, assume the defence of a treaty here 
in this body, which but just now, on the amplest con- 
sideration, in the confidence and calmness of executive 
session, was approved by a vote so decisive ? Sir, the 
country by a vote far more decisive, in a proportion very 
far beyond thirty-nine to nine, has approved your ap- 
proval. Some there are, some few — I speak not now 
of any member of this senate — restless, selfish, reckless, 
'-' the cankers of a calm world and a long peace," pining 
with thirst of notoriety, slaves to their hatred of Eng- 
land, to whom the treaty is distasteful ; to whom any 
treaty, and all things but the glare and clamor, the vain 
pomp and hollow circumstance of war — all but these 
would be distasteful and dreary. But the country is 
with you in this act of wisdom and glory ; its intelli- 
gence ; its morality ; its labor ; its good men ; the 
thoughtful ; the philanthropic ; the discreet ; the masses, 
are with you." "It confirms the purpose of the wise 
and good of both nations to be forever at peace with 
one another, and to put away forever all war from the 
kindred races : w^ar the most ridiculous of blunders ; the 
most tremendous of crimes ; the most comprehensive of 

evils." 

And now to him who in the solitude of his library 
depreciates this act, first, because there was no danger 
of a war with England, I answer that according to the 
overwhelming weight of that kind of evidence by 
which that kind of question must be tried, that is by 
the judgment of the great body of well-informed public 



55 

men at that moment in Congress; in the Government; 
in diplomatic situation — our relations to that power had 
become so delicate, and so urgent, that unless soon ad- 
justed by negotiation there was real danger of war. 
Against such evidence what is the value of the specula- 
tion of a private person, ten years afterwards, in the 
shade of his general studies, whatever his sagacity ? 
The temper of the border population ; the tendencies to 
disorder in Canada, stimulated by sympathizers on our 
side of the line ; the entrance on our territory of a Brit- 
ish armed force in 1837; cutting the Caroline out of 
her harbor, and sending her down the falls ; the arrest 
of McLeod in 1841, a British subject, composing part of 
that force, by the government of New York, and the 
threat to hang him, which a person high in ofhce in 
England, declared, in a letter which was shown to me, 
would raise a cry for war from " whig, radical, and tory " 
which no ministry could resist ; growing irritation caused 
by the search of our vessels under color of suppressing 
the slave-trade ; the long controversy, almost as old as 
the government, about the boundary line — so conduct- 
ed as to have at last convinced each disputant that the 
other was fraudulent and insincere ; as to have enlisted 
the pride of States ; as to have exasperated and agitated 
a large line of border ; as to have entered finally into 
the tactics of political parties, and the schemes of ambi- 
tious men, out-bidding, out-racing one another in a com- 
petition of clamor and vehemence ; a controversy on 
which England, a European monarchy, a first class power, 
near to the great sources of the opinion of the world, 



56 

by ber press, ber diplomacy, and ber universal inter- 
course bad taken great pains to persuade Europe tbat 
our claim was groundless and unconscientious — all tbese 
tilings announced to near observers in public life a crisis 
at band wbicb demanded sometbing more tban "any 
sensible and lionest man " to encounter ; assuring some 
glory to bim Avbo sbould triumpb over it. One sucb 
observer said : " Men stood facing eacb otber witb guns 
on tbeir sboulders, upon opposite sides of fordable rivers, 
tliirty yards wide. Tbe discbarge of a single musket 
would bave brougbt on a war wbose fires would bave 
encircled tbe globe." 

Is tbis act disparaged next because wbat eacb party 
bad for sixty years claimed as tbe true line of tbe old 
treaty was waived, a line of agreement substituted, and 
equivalents given and taken, for gain or loss ? But bere- 
in you will see only, wbat tbe nation bas seen, tbe bold- 
ness as well as sagacity of Mr. Webster. Wben tbe 
award of tbe king of tbe Netberlands, proposing a line 
of agreement, was offered to President Jackson, tbat 
strong will dared not accept it in fiice of tbe party poli- 
tics of Maine — altbougb be advised to offer ber tbe 
value of a million of dollars to procure ber assent to an 
adjustment wbicb bis own mind approved. Wbat be 
dared not do, inferred some peril I suppose. Yet tbe 
experience of twenty years ; of sixty years -, sbould bave 
taugbt all men ; bad taugbt many wbo sbrank from act- 
ing on it, tbat tbe Gordian knot must be cut, not un- 
loosed— tbat all furtber attempt to find tbe true line 
must be abandoned as an idle and a perilous diplomacy ; 



57 

and that a boundary must be made by a bargain worthy 
of nations, or must be traced by the point of the bayonet. 
The merit of Mr. Webster is first that he dared to open 
the negotiation on this basis. I say the boldness. For 
appreciate the domestic difficulties which attended it. 
In its nature it proposed to give up something which 
we had thought our own for half a century ; to cede of 
the territory of more than one State ; it demanded there- 
fore the assent of those states by formal act, committing 
the State parties in power unequivocally ; it was to be 
undertaken not in the administration of Munroe — elect- 
ed by the whole people — not in the administration of 
Jackson whose vast popularity could carry any thing, 
and withstand anything; but just when the death of 
President Harrison had scattered his party ; had alien- 
ated hearts ; had severed tics and dissolved connections 
indispensable to the strength of administration ; creating 
a loud call on Mr. Webster to leave the Cabinet — creat- 
ing almost the appearance of an unwillingness that he 
should contribute to its glory even by largest service to 
the State. 

Yet consider finally how he surmounted every diffi- 
culty. I will not say with Lord Palmerston, in parlia- 
ment, that there was "nobody in England who did not 
admit it a very bad treaty for England." But I may re- 
peat what I said on it in the Senate in 18-i3. "And 
now what does the world see? An adjustment con- 
cluded by a special minister at Washington, by which 
four fifths of the value of the whole subject in contro- 
versy, is left to you as your own ; and by which, for that 



58 

one fifth which England desires to possess, she pays you 
over and over, in national equivalents, imperial equiva- 
lents, such as a nation may give, such as a nation may 
accept, satisfactoiy to your interests, soothing to your 
honor — the navigation of the St. John — a concession 
the value of which nobody disputes, a concession not to 
Maine alone, but to the whole country, to commerce, to 
navif]:ation, as far as winds blow or waters roll — an 
equivalent of inappreciable value, opening an ample path 
to the sea, an equivalent in part for what she receives 
of the territory in dispute — a hundred thousand acres 
in New Hampshire ; fifty thousand acres in Vermont 
and New York ; the point of land commanding the 
great military way to and from Canada by Lake Cham- 
plain ; the fair and fertile island of St. George ; the sur- 
render of a pertinacious pretension to four millions of 
acres westward of Lake Superior. Sir, I will not say 
that this adjustment admits, or was designed to admit 
that our title to the whole territory in controversy was 
perfect and indisputable. I will not do so much in- 
justice to the accom25lished and excellent person who 
represented the moderation and the good sense of the 
English government and people in this negotiation. I 
cannot adopt even for the defence of a treaty which 
I so much approve, the language of a writer in the 
London Morning Chronicle of September last, who has 
been said to be Lord Palmerston, which over and over 
asserts — substantially as his Lordship certainly did in 
parliament, that the adjustment "virtually acknowledges 
the American claim to the whole of the disputed terri- 



69 

toiy," and that " it gives England no share at all ; abso- 
lutely none ; for the capitulation virtually and practi- 
cally yields up the whole territory to the United States, 
and then brings back a small part of it in exchange for 
the right of navigating the St. John." I will not say 
this. But I say first, that by concession of everybody 
it is a better treaty than the administration of President 
Jackson would have most eagerly concluded, if by the 
ofler of a million and a quarter acres of land they could 
have procured the assent of Maine to it. That treaty she 
rejected; this she accepts; and I disparage nobody when I 
maintain that on all parts, and all aspects, of this ques- 
tion, national or state, military or industrial, her opinion 
is worth that of the whole country beside. I say next 
that the treaty admits the substantial justice of your 
general claim. It admits that in its utmost extent it 
was plausible, formidable, and made in pure good faith. 
It admits before the nations that we have not been rapa- 
cious ; have not made flilse clamor ; that we have 
asserted our own, and obtained our own. Adjudging to 
you the possession of four fifths indisputably, she gives you 
for the one fifth which you concede, equivalents, given 
as equivalents, co nomine, on purpose so soothe and save the 
point of honor ; whose intrinsical and comparative value 
is such that you may accept them as equivalents without 
reproach to your judgment, or your finnness, or your 
good faith ; whose intrinsical and conq)arative value, 
tried by the maxims, weighed in the scales of imperial 
traffic, make them a compensation over and over again 
for all we concede." 



60 

But I linger too long upon his public life, and upon this 
one of its great acts. With Avhat^ profound conviction 
of all the difficulties which beset it ; with what anxieties 
for the issue, hope and fear alternately preponderating, 
he entered on that extreme trial of capacity, and good 
fortune, and carried it through, I shall not soon forget. 
As if it were last night, I recall the time when, after the 
Senate had ratified it in an evening executive session, by 
a vote of thirtjMiine to nine, I personally carried to him 
the result, at his own house, and in presence of his 
wife. Then, indeed, the measure of his glory and hap- 
piness seemed full. In the exuberant language of 
Burke, " I stood near him, and his face, to use the ex- 
pression of the Scripture of the first martyr, was as if it 
had been the fjice of an angel. 'Hope elevated, and 
joy-brightened his crest.' I do not knov/ how others 
feel, but if I had stood in that situation, I would not 
have exchanged it for all that kings or people could 
bestow." 

Such eminence and such hold on the public mind as 
he attained demands extraordinary general intellectual 
power, adequate mental culture, an impressive, attract- 
ive, energetic and great character, and extraordinary 
specific power also of influencing the convictions and 
actions of others by speech. These all he had. 

That in the quality of pure and sheer power of intel- 
lect he was of the first class of men, is, I think, the uni- 
versal judgment of all who have personally witnessed 
many of his higher displays, and of all who without 
that opportunity have studied his life in its actions and 



61 

influences, and studied liis mind in its recorded thoughts. 
Sometimes it has seemed to me that to enable one to 
api^reciate with accuracy, as a psychological speculation, 
the intrinsic and absolute volume and texture of that 
brain ; the real rate and measure of those abilities ; it was 
better not to see or hear him, unless you could see or 
hear him frequently, and in various modes of exhibition; 
for undoubtedly there was something in his countenance 
and bearing so expressive of command ; something even 
in his conversational language when saying parva siim- 
misse et modica temperate, so exquisitely plausible, em- 
bodying the likeness at least of a rich truth, the forms 
at least of a large generalization, in an epithet ; an anti- 
thesis ; a pointed phrase -, a broad and peremptory thesis 
— and something in his grander forth-putting wdien 
roused by a great subject or occasion exciting his reason 
and touching his moral sentiments and his heart, so diffi- 
cult to be resisted, approaching so near, going so far be- 
yond, the higher style of man, that although it left you a 
very good witness of his power of influencing others, you 
were not in the best condition, immediately, to pro- 
nounce on the qualit}^, or the source of the influence.. 
You saw the flash and heard the peal ; and felt the ad- 
miration and fear ; but from what region it was launched, 
and by what divinity, and from what Olympian seat, 
you could not certainly yet tell. To do that, you must, 
if you saw him at all, see him many times ; compare 
him with himself, and with others ; follow his dazzlinsr 
career from his father's house ; oljscrve from what com- 
petitors he won those laurels ; study his discourses, 

6 



62 

study them by the side of those of other great men of 
this country and time, and of other countries and times, 
conspicuous in the same fields of mental achievement ; 
look through the crystal water of the style down to the 
golden sands of the thought ; analyze and contrast intel- 
lectual power somewhat ; consider what kind, and what 
quantity of it has been held by students of mind need- 
ful in order to great eminence in the higher mathe- 
matics, or metaphysics, or reason of the law : what 
capacity to analyze, through and through, to the pri- 
mordial elements of the truths of that science ; yet what 
wisdom and sobriety, in order to control the wantonness 
and shun the absurdities of a mere scholastic logic, by 
systematizing ideas, and combining them, and repressing 
one by another, thus producing, not a collection of in- 
tense and conflicting paradoxes, but a code — scientifi- 
cally coherent, and practically useful, — consider what 
description and what quantity of mind have been held 
needful by students of mind in order to conspicuous 
eminence, long maintained, in statesmanship ; that great 
practical science, that great philosophical art — whose 
ends are the existence, happiness and honor of a nation : 
whose truths are to be drawn from the widest survey of 
man ; of social man : of the particular race, and parti- 
cular community for which a government is to be made, 
or kept, or a policy to be provided ; " philosophy in ac- 
tion," demanding at once, or affording place for, the high- 
est speculative genius, and the most skilful conduct of 
men, and of affairs ; and, finally, consider what degree 
and kind of mental power has been found to be required 



6 



o 



in order to influence tlie reason of an audience and a 
nation by speech — not magnetizing the mere nervous 
or emotional nature by an effort of that nature — but 
operating on reason by reason — a great reputation in 
forensic and dehberative eloquence, maintained and ad- 
vancing for a hfetime — it is thus that we come to be 
sure that his intellectual power was as real and as uni- 
form, as its very happiest particular display had been 
imposing and remarkable. 

It was not quite so easy to analyze that power, to 
compare or contrast it with that of other mental celebri- 
ties, and show how it difi'ered or resembled, as it was to 
discern its existence. 

Whether, for example, he would have excelled as 
much in other fields of exertion — in speculative philo- 
sophy, for example, in any of its departments — is a 
problem impossible to determine and needless to move. 
To me it seems quite clear that the whole wealth of his 
powers, his whole emotional nature, his eloquent feeling, 
his matchless capacity to affect others' conduct by aff'ect- 
ing their practical judgments, could not have been 
known, could not have been poured forth in a stream 
so rich and strong and full, could not have so reacted 
on, and aided and winged the mighty intelligence, in 
any other walk of mind, or life, than that he chose — 
that in any other there must have been some disjoining 
of qualities which God had united — some divorce of 
pure intellect from the helps or hindrances or compan- 
ionship of common sense and beautiful genius; and that 
in any field of speculative ideas but half of him, or part 



64 

of him, could have found its sphere. What that part 
might have been or done, it is vain to inquire. 

I have been told that the assertion has been hazarded 
that he " was great in understanding; deficient in the large 
reason ; " and to prove this distinction he is compared dis- 
advantageously, with " Socrates ; Aristotle ; Plato ; Leib- 
nitz ; Newton ; and Descartes." If this means that he 
did not devote his mind, such as it was, to their specu- 
lations, it is true ; but that would not prove that he had 
not as much " higher reason." Where was Bacon's higher 
reason when he was composing his reading on the Statute 
of Uses ? Had he lost it ? or was he only not employ- 
ing it ? or was he employing it on an investigation of 
law ? If it means that he had not as much absolute in- 
tellectual power as they, or could not, in their depart- 
ments, have done what they did, it may be dismissed as 
a dogma incapable of proof, and incapable of refuta- 
tion ; ineffectual as a disparagement; unphilosophical 
as a comparison. 

It is too common with those who come from the rev- 
eries of a cloistered speculation, to judge a practical life ; 
to say of him, and such as he, that they " do not enlarge 
universal law, and first principles ; and philosophical 
ideas ; " that " they add no new maxim formed by induc- 
tion out of human history and old thought." In this 
there is some truth ; and yet it totally fails to prove 
that they do not possess all the intellectual power, and 
all the specific form of intellectual power required for 
such a description of achievement ; and it totally fiiils, 
too, to prove that they do not use it quite as truly to 



65 

"the glory of God, and the bettering of man's estate." 
Whether they posses such power or not, the evidence 
does not disprove ; and it is a pedantic dogmatism, if it 
is not a malignant dogmatism, which, from stick evidence, 
pronounces that they do not ; but it is doubtless so, that 
by an original bias ; by accidental circumstances or deli- 
berate choice, he determined early to devote himself to 
a practical and great duty, and that was to uphold a 
recent, delicate, and complex political system, which his 
studies, his sagacity, taught him, as Solon learned, w^as 
the best the people could bear ; to uphold it ; to adapt 
its essential principles and its actual organism to the 
great changes of his time ; the enlarging territory ; en- 
larging numbers; sharper antagonisms; mightier pas- 
sions ; a new nationality ; and ruider it, and by means 
of it, and by a steady government, a wise policy of busi- 
ness, a temperate conduct of foreign relations, to enable 
a people to develop their resources, and fulfil their 
mission. This he selected as his work on earth; this 
his task ; this, if well done, his consolation, his joy, his 
triumph ! To this, call it, in comparison with the medi- 
tations of philo.^ophy, humble or high, he brought all 
the vast gifts of intellect, whatever they were, where- 
with God had enriched him. And now, do they infer 
that, because he selected such a work to do he could not 
have possessed the higher form of intellectual power ; or 
do they say that, because having selected it, he performed 
it with a masterly and uniform sagacity, and prudence, 
and good sense ; using ever the appropriate means to the 
selected end ; that therefore he could not have possessed 

6=:: 



66 

the higher form of intellectual power ? Because all his 
life long, he recognized that his vocation was that of 
a statesman and a jurist, not that of a thinker and 
dreamer in the shade, still less of a general agitator ; that 
his duties connected themselves mainly with an existing 
stupendous political order of things, to be kept — to be 
adapted with all possible civil discretion and temper to 
the growth of the nation — but by no means to be ex- 
changed for any quantity of amorphous matter in the 
form of " universal law " or new maxims and great ideas 
born since the last change of the moon — because he 
quite habitually spoke the language of the Constitution 
and the law, not the phraseology of a new philosophy ; 
confining himself very much to inculcating historical, tra- 
ditional, and indispensable maxims — neutrality ; justice ; 
good faith ; observance of fundamental compacts of Union 
and the like — because it was America — our America — 
he sought to preserve, and to set forward to her glory — 
not so much an abstract conception of humanity ; be- 
cause he could combine many ideas ; many elements ; 
many antagonisms ; in a harmonious, and noble practi- 
cal politics, instead of fastening on one only, and — that 
sure sign of small or perverted ability — aggravating it 
to disease and falsehood — is it therefore inferred that 
he had not the larger form of intellectual power ? 

And this power was not oppressed, but aided and 
accomplished by exercise the most constant, the most 
severe, the most stimulant, and by a force of will as 
remarkable as his genius, and by adequate mental and 
tasteful culture. How much the eminent greatness 
it reached is due to the various and lofty competition 



G7 

to which he brought, if he could, the most careful 
preparation — competition with adversaries cum qidhiis 
certare erat gloriomis, quam omnino advcrsarios mn habere, 
mm pxcserthn non modo, nunquam sit cud illormn ah ipso 
ciirsus imjjcditus, aid ah ipsis suns, sed contra semper alter 
ah altcro adj'utus, et communicamlo, et monendo, et favendo, 
you may well appreciate. 

I claim much, too, under the name of mere mental 
culture. Remark his stj-le. I allow its full weight to 
the Horatian maxim, scribendi rccte sapcre est et princi- 
pium et fons, and I admit that he had deep and ex- 
quisite judgment, largely of the gift of God. But 
such a style as his is due also to art, to practice — in 
the matter of style, incessant, to great examples of 
fine writing turned by the nightly and the daily hand -, 
to Cicero, through whose pellucid deep seas the pearl 
shows distinct, and large and near, as if within the 
arm's reach; to Virgil, whose magic of words, whose 
exquisite structure and "rich economy of expression," 
no other writer ever equalled ; to our English Bible, 
and especially to the prophetical writings, and of these 
especially to Ezckiel — of some of whose peculiarities, 
and among them that of the repetition of single words, 
or phrases for emphasis and impression, a friend has 
called my attention to some very striking illustrations ; 
to Shakespeare, of the style of whose comic dialogue 
we may, in the language of the great critic, assert '• that 
it is that which in the English nation is never to 
become obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so 
consonant and congenial to analogy, to principles of 



N. 



68 

tlie lano;iiaG:e, as to remain settled and unaltered — 
a style above grossness, below modish and pedantic 
forms of speech, where propriety resides ; " to Addison, 
whom Johnson, Mackintosh, and Macaulay, concur to 
put at the head of all fine writers, for the amenity, 
delicac}^, and unostentatious elegance of his English; 
to Pope, polished, condensed, sententious ; to Johnson 
and Burke, in whom all the affluence and all the 
energy of our tongue in both its great elements of 
Saxon and Latin might be exemplified ; to the study 
and comparison, but not the cojoying of authors such 
as these ; to habits of writing, and speaking, and con- 
versing, on the capital theory of ahvays doing his 
best — thus somewhat, I think, was acquired that re- 
markable production, " the last work of combined study 
and genius," his rich, clear, correct, hamionious, and 
weighty style of prose. 

Beyond these studies and exercises of taste, he had 
read variously and judiciously. If any public man, or 
any man, had more thoroughly mastered British con- 
stitutional and general history, or the history of Brit- 
ish legislation, or could deduce the progress, eras, 
causes, and hindrances of British liberty in more prompt, 
exact, and copious detail, or had in his memory, at any- 
given moment, a more ample political biography, or 
political literature, I do not know him. His library of 
English histor}", and of all history, was always rich, se- 
lect, and catholic, and I well recollect hearing him, in 
1819, while attending a commencement of this College, 
at an evening party sketch, with great emphasis and 



69 

interest of manner, the merits of George Buchanan, the 
historian of Scothand — his latinit}^ and eloquence al- 
most equal to Livy's, his love of liberty and his genius 
greater, and his title to credit not much worse. Ameri- 
can history and American political literature he had by 
heart. The long series of influences that trained us for 
representative and free government; that other series 
of influences which moulded us into a united govern- 
ment — the colonial era — the age of controversy be- 
fore the revolution ; every scene and every person in 
that great tragic action — the age of controversy fol- 
lowing the revolution, and preceding the Constitution, 
unlike the earlier, in which we divided among ourselves 
on the greatest questions which can engage the mind of 
America — the questions of the existence of a national 
government, of the continued existence of the State 
governments, on the partition of powers, on the umpi- 
rage of disputes between them — a controversy on which 
the destiny of the New World was staked ; every problem, 
which has successively engaged our politics, and every 
name which has figured in them, the whole stream of 
our time was open, clear, and present ever to his eye. 

I think, too, that, though not a frequent and ambi- 
tious citer of authorities, he had read, in the course of 
the study of his profession or politics, and had meditated 
all the great writers and thinkers by whom the princi- 
ples of republican government, and all free govern- 
ments, are most authoritatively expounded. Aristotle, 
Cicero, Machiavel, one of whose discourses on Livy, 
maintains in so masterly an argument, how nuich wiser 



70 

and more constant are the people than the prince — a 
doctrine of hberty consolatory and full of joy, Harring- 
ton, Milton, Sidney, Locke, I know he had read and 
weighed. 
Jc^ Other classes of information there were, partly ob- 
tained from books, partly from observation — to some 
extent referable to his two main employments of poli- 
tics and law — by which he was distinguished remarkably. 
Thus, nobody- but was struck with his knowledge of 
civil and phj^sical geography, and to a less extent of 
geology and races ; of all the great routes and marts of 
our foreign, coastwise, and interior commerce ; the sub- 
jects which it exchanges, the whole circle of industry it 
comprehends and passes around ; the kinds of our me- 
chanical and manufacturing productions, and their re- 
lations to all labor, and life ; the history, theories, and 
practice of agriculture, our own and that of other coun- 
tries, and its relations to government, liberty, happiness 
and the character of nations. This kind of information 
enriched and assisted all his public efforts ; but to appre- 
ciate the variety and accuracy of his knowledge, and 
even the true compass of his mind, you must have had 
some familiarity with his friendly written correspon- 
dence, and you must have conversed with him, with 
some dcorree of freedom. There, more than in senate- 
rial or forensic debate, gleamed the true riches of his 
genius, as well as the goodness of his large heart, and 
the kindness of his noble nature. There, with no 
longer a great part to discharge, no longer compelled to 
weigh and measure propositions, to tread the dizzy 



71 

heights which part the antagonisms of the Constitution, 
to put aside allusions and illustrations, which crowded 
on his mind in action, but wdiich the dignity of a public 
appearance had to reject — in the confidence of hospi- 
tality, which ever he dispensed as a prince who also 
was a friend — his memory, one of his most extraordi- 
nary faculties, quite in proportion to all the rest, swept 
free over the readino-s and labors of more than half a 
century ; and then allusions, direct and ready quota- 
tions, a passing, mature criticism, sometimes only d recol- 
lection of the mere emotions which a glorious passage 
or interesting event had once excited, darkening for a 
moment the face, and filling the eye — often an instruct- 
ive exposition of a current maxim of philosophy or 
politics, the history of an invention, the recital of some 
incident casting a new light on some transaction or some 
institution — this flow of unstudied conversation, quite 
as remarkable as any other exhibition of his mind, bet- 
ter than any other, perhaps, at once opened an unex- 
pected glimpse of his various accquirements, and gave 
you to experience delightedlj^ that the " mild senti- 
ments have their eloquence as well as the stormy 
passions." 

There must be added next the element of an impres- 
sive character, inspiring regard, trust, and admiration, 
not unmingled with love. It had, I think, intrinsically 
a charm such as belongs only to a good, noble, and 
beautiful nature. In its combination with so much 
fame, so much force of will, and so much intellect, it 
filled and fascinated the imaiiination and heart. It was 



72 

affectionate in cbildliood and youth, and it was more 
than ever so in the few last months of his long life. It 
is the universal testimony that he gave to his parents, 
in largest measure, honor, love, obedience ; that he 
eagerly appropriated the first means which he could 
command to relieve the father from the debts contracted 
to educate his brother and himself — that he selected 
his first place of professional practice that he might 
soothe the coming on of his old age — that all through 
life he neglected no occasion, sometimes when leaning on 
the arm of a friend, alone, with faltering voice, sometimes 
in the presence of great assemblies, where the tide of 
general emotion made it graceful, to express his " affec- 
tionate veneration of him who reared and defended the 
loof cabin in which his elder brothers and sisters were 
born, against savage violence and destruction ; cherished 
all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and through 
the fire and blood of some years of revolutionary war, 
shrank from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his 
country, and to raise his children to a condition better 
than his own." 

Equally beautiful was his love of all his kindred, and 
of all his friends. When I hear him accused of selfish- 
ness, and a cold, bad nature, I recall him lying sleepless 
all night, not without tears of boyhood, conferring with 
Ezekiel how the darling desire of both hearts should be 
compassed, and he too admitted to the precious privi- 
leges of education ; courageously pleading the cause of 
both brothers in the morning ; prevailing by the wise 
and discerning affection of the mother ; suspending his 



73 

studies of the law, and registering deeds and teaching 
school to earn the means, for both, of availing themselves 
of the opportunity which the parental self-sacrifice had 
placed within their reach — loving him through life, 
mourning him when dead, with a love and a sorrow 
very wonderful — passing the sorrow of woman ; I re- 
call the husband, the father of the living and of the 
earl}' departed, the friend, the counsellor of many years, 
and my heart grows too full and liquid for the refutation 
of words. 

His affectionate nature, craving ever friendship, as 
well as the presence of kindred blood, diffused itself 
through all his private life, gave sincerity to all his hos- 
pitalities, kindness to his eye, warmth to the pressure of 
his hand ; made his greatness and genius unbend them- 
selves to the playfulness of childhood, flowed out in 
graceful memories indulged of the past or the dead, of 
incidents when life was young and promised to be happy 
— gave generous sketches of his rivals — the high con- 
tention now hidden by the handful of earth — hours 
passed fifty years ago with great authors, recalled for 
the vernal emotions which then they made to live 
and revel in the soul. And from these conversations 
of friendship, no man — no man, old or young — went 
away to remember one word of profaneness, one allusion 
of indelicacy, one impure thought, one unbelieving 
suggestion, one doubt cast on the reality of virtue, of 
patriotism, of enthusiasm, of the progress of man — 
one doubt cast on righteousness, or temperance, or 
judgment to come. 

7 



74 

Every one of his tastes and recreations announced 
the same type of character. His love of agriculture, 
of sports in the open air, of the outward world in 
starlight and storms, and sea and boundless wilderness 
— partly a result of the influences of the first fourteen 
years of his life, perpetuated like its other affections 
and its other lessons of a mother's love, the psalms, 
the Bible, the stories of the wars — partly the return 
of an unsophisticated and healthful nature, tiring, for 
a space, of the idle business of political life, its dis- 
tinctions, its artificialities, to employments, to sensations 
which interest without agitating the universal race 
alike, as God has framed it ; in wdiich one feels himself 
only a man, fashioned from tlie earth, set to till it, 
appointed to return to it, yet made in the image of his 
Maker, and with a spirit that shall not die — all dis- 
played a man whom the most various intercourse 
with the w^orld, the longest career of strife and honors, 
the consciousness of intellectual supremacy, the com- 
ing in of a wide fame, constantly enlarging, left as he 
was at first, natural, simple, manly, genial, kind. 

You will all concur, I think, with a learned friend who 
thus calls my attention to the resemblance of his char- 
/ acter, in some of these particulars, to that of Walter 
Scott. 

"Nature endowed both with athletic frames, and a 
noble presence ; both passionately loved rural life, its 
labors, and s^^orts; possessed a manly simplicity free 
from all afiectation, genial and social tastes, full minds, 
and happy elocution; both stamped themselves with 



75 

indelible marks upon the age in which they lived ; 
both were laborious and always with high and virtuous 
aims, ardent in patriotism, overflowing with love of 
^ kindred blood/ and, above all, frank and unostentatious 
Christians." 

I have learned by evidence the most direct and 
satisfactory, that in the last months of his life, the 
whole affectionateness of his nature ; his consideration 
of others; his gentleness; his desire to make them 
hajDpy and to see them happy, seemed to come out in 
more and more beautiful and habitual expression than 
ever before. The long day's public tasks were felt to 
be done ; the cares, the uncertainties, the mental con- 
flicts of high place, w^ere ended ; and he came home 
to recover himself for the few years w^liich he might 
still expect would be his before he should go hence 
to be here no more. And there, I am assured and 
fully believe, no unbecoming regrets pursued him ; no 
discontent, as for injustice suffered or expectations 
unfulfilled ; no self-reproach for any thing done or 
any thing omitted by himself; no irritation, no peevish- 
ness unworth}^ of his noble nature ; but instead, love 
and hope for his country, w^hen she became the sub- 
ject of conversation ; and for all around him, the 
dearest and the most indiilerent, for all breathinti; thin2;s 
about him, the overflow of the kindest heart growing 
in gentleness and benevolence ; paternal, patriarchal 
affections, seeming to become more natural, warm, and 
communicative every hour. Softer and yet brighter 
grew the tints on the sky of parting day ; and the 



76 

last lingering rays, more even than the glories of noon, 
announced how divine was the source from which they 
proceeded ; how incapable to be quenched ; how cer- 
tain to rise on a morning which no night should 
follow. 

Such a character was made to be loved. It was 
loved. Those who knew and saw it in its hour of 
calm — those who could repose on that soft green, 
loved him. His plain neighbors loved him; and one 
said, when he was laid in his grave, "How lonesome 
the world seems ! " Educated young men loved him. 
The ministers of the gospel, the general intelligence 
of the country, the masses afar oi\] loved him. True, 
they had not found in his speeches, read by millions, 
so much adulation of the people ; so much of the 
music which robs the public reason of itself; so many 
phrases of humanity and philanthropy ; and some had 
told them he was lofty and cold — solitary in his great- 
ness ; but every year they came nearer and nearer to 
him, and as they came nearer they loved him better ; 
they heard how tender the son had been, the husband, 
the brother, the father, the friend, and neighbor; that 
he Avas plain, simple, natural, generous, hospitable — 
the heart larger than the brain ; that he loved little 
children and reverenced God, the Scriptures, the sab- 
bath day, the Constitution, and the law — and their 
hearts clave unto him. More truly of him than even 
of the great naval darling of England might it be 
said, that "his presence would set the church bells 
ringing, and give school-boys a holiday — would bring 



77 

children from school and old men from the chimney 
corner, to gaze on him ere he died." The great and 
unavailing lamentation first revealed the deep place 
he had in the hearts of his countrymen. 

You are now to add to this his extraordinary power 
of influencing the convictions of others by speech, and 
you have completed the survey of the means of his 
greatness. And here again I begin by admiring an 
aggregate, made up of excellences and triumphs, 
ordinarily deemed incompatible. He spoke Avith con- 
summate ability to the bench, and yet exactly as, 
according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, 
the bench ought to be addressed. He spoke Avith 
consummate ability to the jury, and yet exactly as, 
according to every sound canon, that totally different 
tribunal ought to be addressed. In the halls of Con- / 
gress, before the people assembled for political discus- 
sion in masses, before audiences smaller and more 
select, assembled for some solemn commemoration of 
the past, or of the dead; in each of these, again, his 
speech, of the first form of ability, was exactly adapted 
also to the critical proprieties of the place; each 
achieved, when delivered, the most instant and specific 
success of eloquence, some of them in a splendid and 
remarkable degree, and yet stranger still, when reduced 
to writing as they fell from his lips, they compose a 
body of reading, in many volumes, solid, clear, rich, 
and full of harmony, a classical and permanent political 
literature. 

And yet all these modes of his eloquence, exactly 

*7 



\/ 



78 

adcapted each to its stage and its end, were stamped 
with his image and superscription ; identified by charac- 
teristics incapable to be counterfeited, and impossible 
to be mistaken. The same high power of reason, 
intent in every one to explore and display some truth ; 
some truth of judicial, or historical, or biographical 
fact; some truth of law, deduced by construction, 
perhaps, or by illation ; some truth of policy, for want 
whereof a nation, generations, may be the worse ; 
reason seeking and unfolding truth: the same tone 
in all of deep earnestness, expressive of strong desire 
that that which he felt to be important should be 
accepted as true, and spring up to action; the same 
transparent, plain, forcible and direct speech, conveying 
his exact thought to the mind, not something less or 
more ; the same sovereignty of form, of brow, and e^^e, 
4 and tone, and manner — everywhere the intellectual 
king of men, standing before you — that same marvel- 
lousness of qualities and results, residing, I know not 
where, in words, in pictures, in the ordering of ideas, 
in felicities indescribable, by means whereof, coming 
from his tongue, all things seemed mended; truth 
seemed more true; probability more plausible; great- 
ness more grand ; goodness more awful ; every aifection 
more tender than when coming from other tongues, — 
these are in all his eloquence. But sometimes it be- 
came individualized, and discriminated even from itself; 
sometimes place and circumstances, great interests at 
stake, a stage, an audience fitted for the highest historic 
action, a crisis, personal or national, upon him, stirred 



70 

the depths of that emotional nature as the anger of 
the goddess stirs the sea on which the great epic is 
beginning ; strong passions, themselves kindled to in- 
tensity, quickened every faculty to a new life ; the 
stimulated associations of ideas brouQ-ht all treasures 
of thought and knowledge within command, the spell, 
which often held his imagination fast, dissolved, and 
she arose and gave him to choose of her urn of gold ; 
earnestness became vehemence, the simple, ^perspicuous, 
measured and direct language became a headlong, full 
and burning tide of speech ; the discourse of reason, 
wisdom, gravity, and beauty, changed to that Jeivou^g, 
that rarest consummate eloquence, grand, rapid, pa- 
thetic, terrible ; the aliquid immensum infinitimique that 
Cicero might have recognized; the master triumph of 
man in the rarest opportunity of his noblest power. 

Such elevation above himself, in congressional debate, \/ 
was most uncommon. Some such there were in the 
great discussions of executive power following the re- 
moval of the deposits, which they who heard them will 
never forget, and some which rest in the tradition of 
hearers only. But there were other fields of oratory on 
which, under the influence of more uncommon springs 
of inspiration, he exemplified, in still other forms, an 
eloquence in which I do not know that he has had a 
superior among men. Addressing masses by tens of 
thousands in the open air, on the urgent political ques- 
tions of the day ; or designated to lead the meditations 
of an hour devoted to the remembrance of some na- 
tional era, or of some incident marking the progress of 



80 

the nation, and lifting him ujd to a view of what is and 
what is past, and some indistinct revelation of the glory 
that lies in the future, or of some great historical name, 
just borne by the nation to his tomb — we have learned 
that then and there, at the base of Bunker Hill, before 
the corner-stone was laid, and again when from the fin- 
ished column the centuries looked on him ; in Fanueil 
Hall, mourning for those with whose s^ooken or written 
eloquence of freedom its arches had so often resounded ; 
on the rock of Plymouth ; before the capitol, of which 
there shall not be one stone left on another, before his 
memory shall have ceased to live — in such scenes, un- 
fettered by the laws of forensic or parliamentary de- 
bate, multitudes uncounted lifting up their eyes to him ; 
some great historical scenes of America around — all 
symbols of her glory, and art, and j)ower, and fortune, 
there — voices of the past, not unheard — shapes beck- 
oning from the future, not unseen — sometimes that 
mighty intellect, borne upwards to a height and kindled 
to an illumination which we shall see no more, wrought 
out, as it were, in an instant, a picture of vision, warn- 
ing, prediction ; the progress of the nation ; the con- 
trasts of its eras ; the heroic deaths ; the motives to 
patriotism ; the maxims and arts imperial by which the 
glory has been gathered and may be heightened — 
wrought out, in an instant, a picture to fade only when 
all record of our mind shall die. 

In looking over the public remains of his oratory, it 
is striking to remark how, even in that most sober, and 
massive understanding and nature, you see gathered and 



81 

expressed the characteristic sentiments and the passing 
time of our America. It is the strong old oak, which 
ascends before you ; yet our soil, our heaven, are attested 
in it, as perfectly as if it were a flower that could grow 
in no other climate, and in no other hour of the year or 
day. Let me instance in one thing only. It is a pecu- 
liarity of some schools of eloquence, that they embody 
and utter, not merely the individual genius and charac- 
ter of the speaker, but a national consciousness ; a na- 
tional era ; a mood ; a hope ; a dread ; a despair, in 
which 3^ou listen to the spoken history of the time. 
There is an eloquence of an expiring nation ; such as 
seems to sadden the glorious sjDeech of Demosthenes; 
such as breathes grand and gloomy from the visions of 
the prophets of the last days of Israel and Judah ; such 
as gave a spell to the expression of Grattan, and of 
Kossuth — the sweetest, most mournful, most awful of 
the words wdiich man may utter, or which man may 
hear, the eloquence of a perishing nation. There is 
another eloquence, in which the national consciousness 
of a young, or renewed and vast strength ; of trust in 
a dazzling, certain, and limitless future ; an inward glo- 
rying in victories yet to be won, sounds out, as by voice 
of clarion, challenging to contest for the highest prize 
of earth — such as that in which the leader of Israel in 
its first days holds up to the new nation the land of 
Promise ; such as that which in the well imagined 
speeches scattered by Liv}^, over the history of the 
" majestic series of victories," speaks the Roman con- 
sciousness of o-rowinfj; aii;<i:randizement which should sub- 



82 

ject the world ; such as that, through which, at the tri- 
bunes of her revohition, in the bulletins of her rising 
Soldier, France told to the world her dream of glory. 
And of this kind, somewhat, is ours ; cheerful ; hopeful ; 
trusting, as befits youth and spring ; the eloquence of 
a State beginning to ascend to the first class of power, 
eminence, and consideration ; and conscious of itself It 
is to no purpose that they tell you it is in bad taste ; 
that it partakes of arrogance, and vanity ; that a true 
national goodbreeding would not know, or seem to 
know, whether the nation is old or young ; whether the 
tides of being are in their flow or ebb ; whether these 
coursers of the sun are sinking, slowly to rest, wearied 
with a journey of a thousand years, or just bounding 
from the Orient unbreathed. Higher laws than those of 
taste determine the consciousness of nations. Higher laws 
than those of taste determine the general forms of the 
expression of that consciousness. Let the downward 
age of America find its orators, and poets, and artists, 
to erect its spirit ; or grace, and soothe its dying ; be it 
ours to go up with Webster to the rock ; the monument ; 
the capitol ; and bid " the distant generations hail ! " 

In this connection remark, somewhat more generally, 
to how extraordinary an extent he had, by his acts, 
words, thoughts, or the events of his life, associated him- 
self forever, in the memory of all of us, with every his- 
torical incident, or at least with every historical epoch ; 
with every policy, with every glory, with every great 
name and fundamental institution, and grand or beauti- 
ful image, which are peculiarly and properly American. 



83 

Look backwards to tlio planting of Plymouth, and James- 
town ; to the various scenes of colonial life in peace and 
v/ar ; to the opening and march, and close of the revo- 
lutionary drama — to the age of the Constitution — to 
Washington, and Franklin, and Adams, and Jefferson — 
to the whole train of causes from the Reformation down- 
wards, which prepared us to be Piepublicans — to that 
other train of causes which led us to be Unionists ; look 
round on field, workshop, and deck, and hear the music 
of labor rewarded, fed and protected — look on the bright 
sisterhood of the States, each singing as a seraph in 
her motion, yet blending in a common beam and swell- 
ing a common harmony — and there is nothing which 
does not bring him by some tie to the memory of 
America. 

We seem to see his form and hear his deep grave 
speech everywhere. By some felicity of his personal 
life ; by some wise, deep, or beautiful word spoken or 
written; by some service of his own, or some commem- 
oration of the services of others, it has come to pass that 
'•' our granite hills, our inland seas and prairies, and fresh, 
unbounded, magnificent wilderness ; " our encircling 
ocean ; the resting-place of the Pilgrims ; our new-born 
sister of the Pacific ; our popular assemblies ; our free 
schools, all our cherished doctrines of education, and of 
the inlluence of religion, and material policy and law, 
and the Constitution, give us back his name. What 
American landscape will you look on — what subject of 
American interest will you study — what source of hope 



84 

or of anxiet}^, as an American, will you acknowledge, 
that it does not recall liim ? 

I have reserved, until I could treat it as a separate and 
final topic, the consideration of the morality of Mr. Web- 
ster's public character and life. To his true fame, to 
the kind and degree of influence which that large series 
of great actions, and those embodied thoughts of great 
intellect are to exert on the future — this is the all- 
important consideration. In the last speech which he 
made in the Senate — the last of those which he made, 
as he said, for the Constitution and the Union, and which 
he might have commended, as Bacon his name and 
memory, " to men's charitable speeches, to foreign na- 
tions, and the next ages," yet with a better hope, he as- 
serted — " The ends I aim at shall be those of my coun- 
try, my God, and truth." Is that praise his ? 

Until the seventh day of March, 1850, 1 think it would 
have been accorded to him by an almost universal 
acclaim, as general, and as expressive of profound and 
intelligent conviction, and of enthusiasm, love, and 
trust, as ever saluted conspicuous statesmanship, tried 
by many crises of affairs in a great nation, agitated 
ever by parties, and wholly free. 

That he had admitted into his heart a desire to win, 
by deserving them, the highest forms of public honor, 
many would have said ; and they who loved him most 
fondl}', and felt the truest- solicitude that he should carry 
a good conscience and pure fame brightening to the 
end, would not have feared to concede. For he was not 



85 

ignorant of himself, and he therefore knew that there 
was nothing within the Union, Constitution and law, too 
high, or too large, or too difficult for him. He believed 
that his natural or his acquired abilities, and his policy 
of administration, would contribute to the true glory of 
America ; and he held no theory of ethics which re- 
quired him to disparage, to suppress, to ignore vast ca- 
pacities of public service merely because they were his 
own. If the fleets of Greece were assembling, and her 
tribes buckling on their arms from Laconia to Mount 
Olympus, from the promontory of Sunium to the isle far- 
thest to the west, and the great epic action was opening, it 
was not for him to fain insanity or idiocy, to escaj)e the per- 
ils and the honor of command. But that all this in him 
had been ever in subordination to a principled and beau- 
tiful public virtue ; that every sectional bias, every party 
tie, as well as every personal aspiring, had been uniform- 
ly held by him for nothing against the claims of coun- 
try ; that nothing lower than country seemed worthy 
enough — nothing smaller than country large enough — 
for that great heart, would not have been questioned by 
a whisper. Ah ! if at any hour before that day he had 
died, how would then the great procession of the people 
of America — the great triumphal procession of the 
dead — have moved onward to his grave — the sublim- 
ity of national sorrow, not contrasted, not outraged by 
one feeble voice of calumny ! 

In that antecedent public life, embracing from 1812 
to 1850 — a period of thirty-eight years — I fmd 

grandest proofs of the genuineness and comprehcn- 

8 



86 

sivencss of his patriotism, and the boldness and man- 
liness of his public virtue. He began his career of 
politics as a federalist. Such was his father — so be- 
loved and revered ; such his literary and professional 
companions; such, although by no very decisive or 
certain preponderance, the community in which he 
was bred and was to live. Under that name of party 
he entered Congress, personally, and by connection, 
opposed to the war, which was thought to bear with 
such extreme sectional severity upon the North and 
East. And yet, one might almost say that the only 
thing he imbibed from federalists or federalism, was 
love and admiration for the Constitution as the means 
of union. That passion he did inherit from them; 
that he cherished. 

He came into Congress, opposed, as I have said, to 
the war ; and behold him, if you would judge of the 
quality of his political ethics, in opposition. Did those 
eloquent lips, at a time of life when vehemence and 
imprudence are expected, if ever, and not ungraceful, 
let fall ever one word of faction? Did he ever deny 
one power to the general government, which the 
soundest expositors of all creeds have allowed it ? Did 
he ever breathe a syllable which could excite a region, 
a State, a family of States, against the Union — which 
could hold out hope or aid to the enemy? — which 
sought or tended to turn back or to chill the fiery 
tide of a new and intense nationality, then bursting 
ujD, to flow and burn till all things appointed to America 
to do shall be fulfilled ? These questions in their sub- 



S7 

stance, he put to Mr. Calhoun, m 1838, m tlie Senate, 
and that great man — one of the authors of the war — 
just then, only then, in relations unfriendly to Mr. 
Webster, and who had just insinuated a reproach on 
his conduct in the w\ar, was silent. Did Mr. AVebster 
content himself even with objecting to the details of 
the mode in which the administration waged the war ? 
No, indeed. Taught by his constitutional studies that 
the Union was made in part for commerce, familiar 
with the habits of our long line of coast, knowing 
well how many sailors and jfishermen, driven from 
every sea by embargo and war, burned to go to the 
a;un-deck and aveno-e the lono; wrono\s of Ensfland on 
the element where she had inflicted them, his opposi 
tion to the war manifested itself by teaching the nation 
that the deck was her field of fame. Non illi imperium 
pelagi saevimi que trideuiimi, sed nobis, sorte dtdum. 

But I might recall other evidence of the sterling 
and unusual qualities of his public virtue. Look in 
how manly a sort he, not merely conducted a particular 
argument or a particular speech, but in how manly 
a sort, in how high a moral tone, he uniformly dealt 
with the mind of his country. Politicians got an advan- 
tage of him for this while he lived ; let the dead have just 
praise to-day. Our public life is one long electioneer- 
ing, and even Burke tells you that at popular elections 
the most rigorous casuists will remit something of 
their severity. But where do you find him flattering 
his countrymen, indirectly or directly, for a vote ? On 
what did he ever place himself but good counsels and 



88 

useful service ? His arts were manly arts, and he never 
saw a day of temptation when he would not rather 
fall tlian stand on any other. Who ever heard that 
voice cheering the people on to rapacity, to injustice, 
to a vain and guilty glory ? Who ever saw that pencil 
of light hold up a picture of manifest destiny to dazzle 
the fancy ? How anxiously rather, in season and out, 
by the energetic eloquence of his youth, by his counsels 
bequeathed on the verge of a timely grave, he preferred 
to teach that by all possible acquired sobriety of mind, 
by asking reverently of the past, by obedience to the 
law, by habits of patient and legitimate labor, by the 
cultivation of the mind, by the fear and worship of God, 
we educate ourselves for the future that is revealing. 
Men said he did not sympathize with the masses, 
because his phraseology was rather of an old and 
simple school, rejecting the nauseous and vain repeti- 
tions of humanity and philanthropy, and progress and 
brotherhood, in which may lurk heresies so dreadful, 
of socialism or disunion ; in which a selfish, hollow, and 
shallow ambition may mask itself — the syren song 
which would lure the pilot from his course. But I 
say that he did sympathize with them; and, because 
he did, he came to them not with adulation, but with 
truth ; not with words to j^lease, but with measures to 
serve them ; not that his popular sympathies were less, 
but that his personal and intellectual dignity and his 
public morality were greater. 

And on the seventh day of March, and down to the 
final scene, might he not still say as ever before, that 



89 

" all the ends ho aimed at were his country's, his God's, 
and truth's." He declared, "I speak to-day for the 
preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause. 
I speak to-day out of a solicitous and anxious heart 
for the restoration to the country of that quiet and 
harmony, which make the blessings of this Union so 
rich and so dear to us all. These are the motives and 
the sole motives that influence me." If in that decla- 
ration he was sincere, was he not bound in conscience 
to give the counsels of that day? What were they? 
What was the single one for which his political morality 
was called in question ? Only that a provision of the 
Federal Constitution, ordaining the restitution of fugi- 
tive slaves, should be executed according to its true 
meaning. This only. And might he not in good con- 
science keep the Constitution in this part, and in all, 
for the preservation of the Union ? 

Under his oath to support it, and to support it all, 
and with his opinions of that duty so long held, pro- 
claimed uniformly, in whose vindication on some great 
days, he had found the chief opportunity of his per- 
sonal glory, might he not, in good conscience support 
it, and all of it, even if he could not, and no human 
intelligence could, certainly, know, that the extreme 
evil would follow, in immediate consequence, its viola- 
tion? Was it so recent a doctrine of his that the 
Constitution was obligatory upon the national and in- 
dividual conscience, that you should ascribe it to sudden 
and irresistible temptation ? Why, what had he, quite 

down to the seventh of March, that more truly indi- 

8* 



90 



viduallzecl him — what had he more characteristically 
his own — wherewithal had he to glory more or other 
than all beside, than this very doctrine of the sacred 
and 2^ermanent obligation to support each and all 
parts of that great compact of union and justice? 
Had not this been his distinction, his specialitf/ — 
almost the foible of his greatness — the darling and mas- 
ter passion ever ? Consider that that was a sentiment 
which had been part of his conscious nature for more 
than sixty years; that from the time he bought his 
first copy of the Constitution on the handkerchief, and 
revered parental lips had commended it to him, with 
all other holy and beautiful things, along with lessons 
of reverence to God, and the belief and love of His 
Scriptures, along with the doctrine of the catechism, 
the unequalled music of Watts, the name of Washing- 
ton — there had never been an hour that he had not 
held it the master work of man — just in its ethics, 
consummate in its joractical wisdom, paramount in its 
injunctions; that every j'car of life had deepened the 
original impression : that as his mind opened, and his 
associations widened, he found that every one for whom 
he felt respect, instructors, theological and moral teach- 
ers, his entire party connection, the opposite party, 
and the whole country, so held it, too ; that its fruits 
of more than half a century of union, of happiness, 
of renown, bore constant and clear witness to it in 
his mind, and that it chanced that certain emergent 
and rare occasions had devolved on him to stand forth 
to maintain it, to vindicate its interpretation, to vindi- 



91 

cate its authority, to unfold its workings and uses; 
that he had so acquitted himself of that opportunity 
as to have won the title of its Expounder and Defender, 
so that his proudest memories, his most prized renown, 
referred to it, and were entwined with it — and say 
whether with such antecedents, readiness to execute, 
or disposition to evade, would have been the hardest 
to explain ; likeliest to suggest the surmise of a new 
temptation ! He who knows any thing of man, knows 
that his vote for beginning the restoration of harmony 
by keeping the whole Constitution, was determined, 
was necessitated by the great law of sequences — a 
great law of cause and effect, running back to his 
mother's arms, as resistless as the law which moves the 
system about the sun — and that he must have given 
it, although it had been opened to him in vision, that 
within the next natural day his " eyes should be turned 
to behold for the last time the sun in heaven." 

To accuse him in that act of " sinning against his o^vn 
conscience," is to charge, one of these things ; either 
that no well instructed conscience can approve and 
maintain the Constitution, and each of its parts ; and there- 
fore that his, by inference, did not approve it ; or that 
he had never employed the proper means of instructing 
his conscience ; and therefore its approval, if it were 
given, was itself an immorality. The accuser must as- 
sert one of these propositions. He will not deny, I take 
it for granted, that the conscience requires to be in- 
structed by political teaching, in order to guide the citi- 
zen, or the public man aright, in the matter of political 



92 

duties. Will lie say that the moral sentiments alone, 
whatever their origin ; whether factitious and deriva- 
tive, or parcel of the spirit of the child and born with 
it ; that they alone, by force of strict and mere ethical 
training, become qualified to pronounce authoritatively 
whether the Constitution, or any other vast, and com- 
plex civil policy, as a whole, whereby a nation is crea- 
ted, and preserved, ought to have been made, or ought 
to be executed? Will he venture to tell you that if 
your conscience approves the Union, the Constitution in 
all its parts, and the law which administers it, that you 
are bound to obey and uphold them ; and if it disap- 
proves, you must, according to your measure, and in 
your circles of agitation, disobey and subvert them, and 
leave the matter there — forgetting or designedly omit- 
ting to tell you also that you are bound, in all good 
faith and diligence to resort to studies and to teachers 
ah extra — in order to determine whether the conscience 
ought to approve or disapprove the Union, the Constitu- 
tion and the law, in view of the whole aggregat eof their 
nature and fruits? Does he not perfectly know that 
this moral faculty, however trained, by mere moral 
institution, specifically directed to that end, to be 
tender, sensitive, and peremptory, is totally unequal to 
decide on any action, or any thing, but the very sim- 
plest ; that which produces the most palpable and im- 
mediate result of unmixed good, or unmixed evil ; and 
that when it comes to judge on the great mixed cases of 
the world, where the consequences are numerous, their 
development slow and successive, the light and shadow 



93 

of a blended and multiform good and evil spread out on 
the lifetime of a nation, that then morality must bor- 
row from history ; from politics; from reason operating 
on history and politics ; her elements of determination ? 
I think he must agree to this. He must agree, I think, 
that to single out one provision in a political system of 
many parts and of elaborate interdependence, to take it 
all alone, exactly as it stands, and without attention to 
its origin and history ; the necessities, morally resistless, 
which prescribed its introduction into the system, the 
unmeasured good in other forms which its allowance 
buys, the unmeasured evil in other forms which its allow- 
ance hinders — without attention to these, to present it in 
all " the nakedness of a metaphysical abstraction " to 
the mere sensibilities ; and ask if it is not inhuman, and 
if they answer according to their kind, that it is, then 
to say that the j^roblem is solved, and the right of dis- 
obedience is made clear — he must agree that this is 
not to exalt reason and conscience, but to outrage both. 
He must agree that although the supremacy of con- 
science is absolute whether the decision be right or 
wrong, that is, according to the real qualities of things or not, 
that there lies back of the actual conscience, and its 
actual decisions, the great anterior duty of having a 
conscience that shall decide according to the real qualities of 
things; that to this vast attainment some adequate 
knowledge of the real qualities of the things which are 
to be subjected to its inspection is indispensable ; that if 
the matter to Ije judged of is any thing so large, com- 
plex, and conventional as the duty of the citizen, or the 



94 



public man, to the State ; the duty of preserving or de- 
stroying the order of things in which we are born ; the 
duty of executing or violating one of the provisions of 
organic law which the country, having a wide and clear 
view before and after, had deemed a needful instrumen- 
tal means for the preservation of that order ; that then 
it is not enough to relegate the citizen, or the public 
man, to a higher law, and an interior illumination, and 
leave him there. Such discourse is " as the stars, which 
give so little light because they are so high." He must 
agree that in such case, morality itself should go to 
school. There must be science as well as conscience, as 
old Fuller has said. She must herself learn of history ; 
she must learn of politics ; she must consult the build- 
ers of the State, the living and the dead, to know its 
value, its aspects in the long run, on happiness and 
morals ; its dangers ; the means of its preservation ; the 
maxims and arts imperial of its glory. To fit her to be 
the mistress of civil life, he will agree, that she must 
come out for a space from the interior round of emo- 
tions, and subjective states and contemplations, and in- 
trospection, " cloistered, unexercised, unbreathed " — 
and, carrj-ing with her nothing but her tenderness, her 
scrupulosity, and her love of truth, survey the object- 
ive realities of the State ; ponder thoughtfully on the 
complications, and impediments, and antagonisms which 
make the noblest politics but an aspiring, an approxima- 
tion, a compromise, a type, a shadow of good to come, 
" the buying of great blessings at great prices " — and 



95 

there learn ci\dl duty secundum suhjectam matenam. "Add 
to your virtue knowledge " — or it is no virtue. 

And now, is he who accuses Mr. Webster of " sinning 
against his own conscience," quite sure that he hioivs, 
that that conscience, — well instructed by profoundest 
political studies, and thoughts of the reason; well 
instructed by an ajDpropriate moral institution sedu- 
lously applied, did not commend and approve his 
conduct to himself? Does he know, that he had not 
anxiously, and maturely studied the ethics of the Con- 
stitution; and as a question of ethics, but of ethics 
applied to a stupendous problem of practical life, and 
had not become satisfied that they were right ? Does 
he know that he had not done this, when his faculties 
were all at their best ; and his motives under no suspi- 
cion? May not such an inquirer, for aught you can 
know ; may not that great mind have verily and 
conscientiously thought that he had learned in that 
investigation many things ? May he not have thought 
that he learned, that the duty of the inhabitants of 
the free States, in that day's extremity, to the republic, 
the duty at all events of statesmen, to the republic, is 
a little too large, and delicate, and difficult, to be all com- 
prehended in the single emotion of compassion for one 
class of persons in the commonwealth, or in carrjang out 
the single principle of abstract, and natural, and violent 
justice to one class ? May he not have thought that he 
found there some stupendous exemplifications of what we 
read of, in books of casuistry, the "dialectics of con- 
science," as conflicts of duties; such things as the 



96 

conflicts of the greater with the less ; conflicts of the 
attainable with the visionary ; conflicts of the real with 
the seeming; and may he not have been soothed to 
learn that the evil which he found in this part of the 
Constitution was the least of two ; was unavoidable ; 
was compensated ; was justified ; was commanded, as by 
a voice from the mount, by a more exceeding and 
enduring good? May he not have thought that he 
had learned, that the grandest, most difficult, most 
pleasing to God, of the achievements of secular wisdom 
and philanthropy, is the building of a state; that of 
the first class of grandeur and difficulty, and acceptable- 
ness to Him, in this kind, was the building of our own : 
that unless everybody of consequence enough to be 
heard of in the age and generation of Washington — 
unless that whole age and generation were in a con- 
spiracy to cheat themselves, and history, and posterity, 
a certain policy of concession and forbearance of region 
to region, was indispensable to rear that master work 
of man ; and that that same policy of concession and for- 
bearance is as indispensable, more so, now, to afford 
a 1 ational ground of hope for its preservation ? May 
he not have thought that he had learned that the 
obligation, if such in any sense you may call it, of one 
State to allow itself to become an asylum for those fly- 
ing from slavery in another State, was an obligation of 
benevolence, of humanity only, not of justice ; that it 
must, therefore, on ethical principles, be exercised under 
all the limitations which regulate and condition the 
benevolence of States ; that therefore each is to exer- 



97 

cise it in strict subordination to its own interests, esti- 
mated by a wise statesmanship, and a well instructed 
public conscience ; that benevolence itself, even its 
ministrations of mere good-'will, is an affair of measure 
and of proportions ; and must choose sometimes between 
the greater good, and the less ; that if, to the highest 
degree, and widest diffusion of human happiness, a 
Union of States such as ours, some free, some not so, 
was necessary; and to such Union the Constitution was 
necessary; and to such a Constitution this clause was 
necessary, humanity itself prescribes it, and presides in 
it? May he not have thought that he learned that 
there are proposed to humanity in this world many 
fields of l)eneficent exertion; some larger, some smaller, 
some more, some less expensive and profitable to till ; 
that among these it is always lawful, and often indispen- 
sable to make a choice ; that sometimes, to acquire the 
right, or the ability to labor in one, it is needful to 
covenant, not to invade another ; and that such cove- 
nant, in partial restraint, rather in reasonable direction of 
philanthropy, is good in the forum of conscience ; and 
setting out with these very elementary maxims of prac- 
tical morals, may he not have thought that he learned 
from the careful study of the facts of our history, and 
opinions, that to acquire the power of advancing the 
dearest interests of man, through generations countless, 
by that luiequalled security of peace and progress, the 
Union ; the power of advancing the interest of each 
State, each region, each relation — tlie slave and the 
master ; the power of subjecting a whole continent all 

9 



98 

astir, and on fire with the emulation of young repub- 
lics ; of subjecting it, through ages of household calm, 
to the sweet influences of Christianity, of culture, of 
the great, gentle, and sure reformer, time, that to enable 
us to do this, to enable us to grasp this boundless and 
ever-renewing harvest of philanthropy, it would have 
been a good bargain — that humanity herself would 
have approved it — to have bound ourselves never so 
much as to look across the line into the inclosure of 
Southern municipal slavery ; certainly never to enter 
it ; still less, still less to 

" Pluck its berries liarsli and crude, 
And witli forced fingei-s rude 
Shatter its leaves before the mellowing year." 

Until the accuser who charges him, now that he is in 
his grave, " with having sinned against his conscience," 
will assert that the conscience of a public man may not, 
must not, be instructed by profound knowledge of the 
vast subject-matter with which public life is conversant 
— even as the conscience of the mariner may be and 
must be instructed by the knowledge of navigation ; 
and that of the pilot by the knowledge of the depths and 
shallows of the coast ; and that of the engineer of the 
boat and the train, by the knowledge of the capacities 
of his mechanism, to achieve a proposed velocity ; and 
will assert that he is certain that the consummate science 
of our great stixiesman, teas felt hj himself io p- escribe to his 
moralily another conduct than that which he adopted, 
and that he thus consciously outraged that " sense of 



99 

duty which pursues us ever" — is he not inexcusable, 
whoever he is, that so judges another? 

But it is time that this eulogy was spoken. My heart 
goes back into the cotlin there with him, and I would 
pause. I went — it is a day or two since — alone, to 
see again the home which he so dearly loved, the cham- 
ber where he died, the grave in which they laid him — 
all habited as when 

" His look drew audience still as niglit, 
Or summer's noontide air," 

till the heavens be no more. Throughout that spacious 
and calm scene all things to the eye showed at first 
unchanged. The books in the library, the portraits, 
the table at which he wrote, the scientific culture of 
the land, the course of agricultural occupation, the 
coming in of harvests, fruit of the seed his own hand 
had scattered, the animals and implements of husband- 
ry, the trees planted by him in lines, in copses, in 
orchards, by thousands, the seat under the noljle elm 
on which he used to sit to feel the southwest wind at 
evening, or .hear the breathings of the sea, or the not 
less audible music of the starry heavens, all seemed 
at first luichanged. The sun of a bright day, from 
which, however, something of the fervors of mid- 
summer were wanting, fell temperately on them all, 
filled the air on all sides with the utterances of life, 
and oloamed on the lon<j; line of ocean. Some of those 
whom on earth he loved best, still were there. The 
great mind still seemed to preside ; the great presence 



100 



to be with you ; you might expect to hear agam tl 
ieh aud playful tones of the voice of the old Uo.p>tal- 
' Yet a moment more, and all the .cene took on 
the aspect of one great ^nonument, inscribed ..th Ins 
L,.e, and sacred to his memory. And sneh rt sha e 
i„ all the future of America- The -^^-^-^'^^ 
Ueness, and loneliness, and darkness, .^ ^ >«« 
.ee it now, .ill pass away ; the sharp gnef of ov nd 
friendship «ill become soothed ; men «,11 repair hithei 
' Ly are .vont to commemorate the great days of 
bistory ; the san.e glance shall take in, and the same 
lotions shall greet and bless the Harbor of the 
Pikrims, and the Tomb of Webster. 



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